UNTIL NASA

:)))

Ok so, Velcro is actually a company name and not a product. What we call velcro is actually a ‘hook and loop fastener”. Both the company Velcro and the hook-and-loop were founded/invented by the same person: George de Mestral, a swiss electrical engineer.

Fun fact: velcro is a combination of ‘velours’ and ‘crochet’ so it’s literally velvet-hook

The story goes that while De Mestral was on a hunting trip in 1941 he noticed that a very special plant kept sticking to him and his dog…or rather the seed pods did

Introducing

Burdock

(Burdock or wild rhubarb as a plant has a separate and very long history as a medicinal plant spanning across Eurasia and North America)

Or in this case, the Burdock seed pods specifically which up close look like this:

See where this is going?

De mestral, the ever inventive and curious man (this was bound to happen, he tried to patent his toy airplane as a 12 yr old and also made an asparagus peeler), looked at the seed pods under a microscope and decided that he could probably make a synthetic version that could work as an inbetween of buttons and zippers.

He traveled around Europe looking for a manufacturer, but they all told him that mass-manufacturing was out of the question. He finally found one in Lyon, France who could make a nylon-cotton fabric.

With that fabric he created the first velcro BY HAND and was able to receive a patent in 1955.

The hardest part was making the tiny tiny hooks. With the cotton-nylon blend, he was able to make them but ONLY by hand. He took the hooks and would attach them to a separate piece of fabric using tiny loops.

Imagine taking nylon and making tiny hooks like these by hand. Yeah

He didn’t come up with the mass-manufacturing until a couple years later when he came up with a system that was basically a loom that used barber’s clippers to cut the nylon at a precise angle.

Anyway~ he actually then started selling mass-manufactured velcro in Europe and the US in the 60s but people didn’t really like it

UNTIL NASA

Velcro then went from a weird little thing to ‘oh shit astronauts use this in space to keep stuff from flying everywhere’ and ‘mommy, I want a velcro watch like Buzz Aldrin. Please~”

And that dear friends, is the story of Velcro and the swiss dude who noticed an annoying quirk of a plant’s will to reproduce

velcro is kinda crazy if u think about it