“For the historian there are no banal things,” said the Swiss architectural critic Siegfried Giedion. A historian of technology is supposed to know this, but it helps to be reminded from time to time. My most important reminder came during a course that I taught on invention, in which a student proposed to write her term paper on the history of the zipper. I was skeptical. What kind of story could there be in the history of a simple, ubiquitous device that was such a trivial part of everyday life?

The answer was that there was a wonderful story there, and as Giedion would not have been surprised to learn, one full of provocative lessons for how new technologies really come into being. The zipper, it turns out, is the perfect vehicle for exploring how and why men and women seek to create new things and how difficult it in fact can be to change the ways of the world, no matter how clever and ingenious our inventions are.

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