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Switzerland, the summer of 1941. A man comes home from a walk in the Jura mountains with his dog. Both of them are covered in burrs, the little spiky seed heads of the burdock plant. They are stuck to his trousers and tangled all through the dog’s fur. Most people would sigh and pick them off. George de Mestral picked one off, and put it under his microscope.
Covered in burrs
George de Mestral was born in 1907 near Lausanne, in Switzerland. He was an inventor from the very beginning. At the age of twelve he received his first patent, for a model aeroplane. He studied engineering in Lausanne and then worked in the machine shop of an engineering company.
He also loved to walk in the hills with his dog. On that summer day in 1941, the burrs simply would not let go.
Under the microscope
Under the microscope he saw why. Each burr was covered with hundreds of tiny hooks. And the cloth of his trousers, and the fur of his dog, were full of tiny loops. The hooks caught the loops and held on.
Then George had a thought nobody had had before. What if you could make two strips of cloth, one with tiny hooks and one with tiny loops? Press them together, and they would hold. Pull, and they would come apart. Again and again.
They laughed
When he talked about his idea, few people took him seriously. Some openly laughed. A fastener copied from a weed?
He did not give up. He found a weaver in Lyon, in France, which was then a great centre of weaving. Together they made two cotton strips that really did stick together. But cotton was too soft. After a little use, the hooks wore out.
So George kept searching. Finally he found the answer in nylon, a new material at the time. When nylon thread was sewn under hot infrared light, it formed tough little hooks that kept their shape. He bought a pair of shears and cut the tops off the nylon loops to make the hooks.
Making it by hand was one thing. Making it on a machine was much harder. It took him years of patient work, and the help of a loom-maker in Basel, before a machine could weave the hooks and loops properly.
Velvet and hook
In 1951 he applied for a patent in Switzerland, and he received it a few years later. He gave his invention a name made from two French words: velours, meaning velvet, and crochet, meaning hook. Velcro.
At first the fashion world was not impressed. In the early 1960s, tailors and clothing makers thought it looked like cheap leftover fabric. It seemed that nobody wanted it on their clothes.
To the Moon and onto every shoe
Then came help from an unexpected place. NASA used Velcro on the Apollo missions to the Moon, to help astronauts hold things in place in their spacecraft and handle their bulky suits. After that, skiers, divers and sailors wanted it too, and then everyone else.
His company grew around the world, selling millions of yards of hook-and-loop tape every year. George de Mestral died in 1990. In 1999 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Every morning, somewhere, a small child sits on the floor, presses a strap across a shoe and hears that little ripping sound. No laces, no help needed: I did it myself. That moment of pride began with a dog running through the Jura and a man who did not just brush the burrs away, but looked at them.
What we can learn
George de Mestral saw what millions of people had seen before him, and looked a little longer. Curiosity like that often runs in families: a grandfather who took clocks apart, a mother who always asked how things worked. Those curious people and their small discoveries are worth remembering, and the best way to keep them is to write their stories down.
A summer walk, a happy dog, and a handful of sticky burrs. Every time you hear that ripping sound, you are hearing what one curious man saw under his microscope.
Who in your family always took things apart to see how they worked? Get free questions to ask them, read our step-by-step guide on how to write your life story, and start writing your own story at talesof.life.
Sources: WIPO – From a Mountain Walk to 2,100 Patents: The Velcro IP Story; Swissinfo – How a Swiss invention hooked the world; Wikipedia – George de Mestral. Pictures: burdock hooks (Prosthetic Head, CC BY-SA 4.0) and a dog with burrs in its fur (Flobbadob, CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.