Believe it or not, there is a National Zipper Day. It is April 29th. I love invention and innovation. With a father who’s an inventor, I know very well an invention is not developed in one day. It can take years of R&D. So, what is the story of the zipper? Who invented it? How did it get its name?
The first inventor to get credit for the zipper was Elias Howe in 1851, better known for his invention of the lockstitch sewing machine. He received a patent for an "Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure." But his patent day is NOT National Zipper Day. Elias didn’t try to do much with this closing mechanism, too busy with the new, popular and revolutionary sewing machine. By the way, there’s a delightful account on Wikipedia about how he discovered where the eye of the needle had to be located for the sewing machine to work.
In 1890, Max Wolff of Moscow, invented the spiral zipper. That’s not the celebrated fastener either.
The next inventor of the zipper was Whitcomb Judson, 42 years later in 1893. He patented a "Clasp Locker," mainly a fastener for shoes that made its debut at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. It didn’t have much commercial success. Sometimes it popped open unexpectedly. Judson also invented the pneumatic street railway, used in the first attempt to create a subway system in New York City in 1870. Politics halted the system’s expansion.
Judson did, however, start the Universal Fastener Company. After it reorganized in 1901 as the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company, an electrical engineer named Gideon Sundback came aboard. Judson patented again in 1905.
A turning point in the development of the zipper could have come about by a patent registered 1911 in Switzerland by Mrs. Catharina Kuhn-Moos and Mr. Henri Forster.
But it was Sundback’s next patent in 1913 that started to resemble the contemporary zipper and is the patent date celebrated as National Zipper Day.
Sundback had another patent for a greatly improved zipper in 1917. It wasn’t until 1925 that consumers started seeing zippers incorporated into clothing, first on leather jackets. Fabrics had to catch up with the zipper to be strong enough for the new metal fasteners. There were several more patents before people really started to see the zipper in merchandise in the 1950s.
And how did the zipper get its name? It was Benjamin Franklin Goodrich (of rubber tire fame) who saw the invention in 1923 and liked the “zipping” noise it made. He decided to incorporate these fasteners into the company’s new rubber boots. And the name stuck. It’s an onomatopoeia.
And that’s the real, convoluted story of the zipper. There’s even more nuance to the tale, but I’ll zip it for now!
