Skip to main content

Fascinating Fastener

March 2023
1min read

Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty

by Robert Friedel, W. W. Norton & Company, 256 pages, $23.00. CODE: NRT-1

Our everyday world is filled with the dense residue of unimagined human experience. Take the zipper, that most seemingly trivial of machines—hard even to think of as a machine. The story behind its invention is a saga of imagination, persistence, failure, defiant optimism, patience, and even romantic love. The first patent for a protozipper device was granted in 1893 to Whitcomb Judson of Chicago, an inventor full of far-fetched bright ideas. Like most of them, it didn’t work at all. Yet Judson somehow managed to find both an endlessly supportive financial backer and a persistent salesman to plug the device, and he kept trying to improve it. More than a decade later, a Swedish immigrant engineer named Gideon Sundback hired on at the little company trying to develop the still nearly hopeless thing—apparently lured mainly by his love for the boss’s daughter, whom he later married—and he resolved to make it work. Years went by. In 1913 Sundback finally, ingeniously, figured out the zipper as we know it. And then followed a struggle, just as long and hard, to get people to use it. It was sewn into money belts during World War I and showed up on rubber boots five years after the war, but for more than two decades it remained a marginal novelty item. It didn’t really catch on until the late 1930s.

Robert Friedel, a professor of the history of technology at the University of Maryland, is a first-rate storyteller, and he tells a story with a very colorful cast of characters that is engaging from beginning to end. Along the way he deftly draws out many lessons about the nature of invention: how uninevitable the most basic technological advance can really be and how utterly wrapped up with human desire and will all the machinery we surround ourselves with really is.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "May/June 1994"

Authored by: William B. Meyer

American attitudes toward them have taken a 180-degree turn over the last century—and so have the battles they provoke

Authored by: John Steele Gordon

Mary Mallon could do one thing very well, and all she wanted was to be left to it

Authored by: The Editors

Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty

Authored by: The Editors

Alone With the President

Authored by: The Editors

The Authentic Guide to Drinks of the Civil War Era, 1853–1873

Authored by: The Editors

Ride With Me—Connecticut

Authored by: The Editors

We’ll Meet Again: The Love Songs of World War II

Authored by: The Editors

The Home Front, 1938–1945

Authored by: The Editors

Gershwin Plays Gershwin
The Piano Rolls

Authored by: The Editors

The Hudson Valley

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.