How Velcro Was Invented

In the 1940s, a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral returned from a walk in the countryside and noticed that his jacket and his dog's fur were covered in small, stubborn burrs. Instead of simply picking them off, he examined one under a microscope and found that each burr was covered in tiny hooks, and that those hooks had caught onto the small loops naturally present in the fabric of his clothing and the dog's fur. That simple observation became the basis for a new kind of fastener. De Mestral spent years experimenting with different materials before settling on nylon, which could be manufactured with a consistent, durable shape under heat. The final design used two separate strips: one covered in stiff, tiny hooks, and the other covered in soft loops. When pressed together, thousands of hooks catch onto thousands of loops at once, creating a bond strong enough to hold weight, yet weak enough at any single point that the two strips can still be peeled apart by hand. He patented the invention in 1955 under the name Velcro, a combination of the French words velours and crochet, meaning velvet and hook. Early on, the fastener was seen mostly as a novelty, but it gained a major reputation boost when NASA began using it to secure equipment and tools in zero gravity during space missions.