What a burdock burr taught George de Mestral about fastening things

In 1941 a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral came back from the countryside with burrs stuck to his trousers and all through his dog’s coat. Most people would have picked them off and thrown them away. He took one home and put it under a microscope.

What he saw, according to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, was a burr covered in thousands of tiny hooks. They were what let it cling to cloth and fur. The plant was burdock, a common wayside weed. The idea that came out of it is now on shoes, clothes, sports kit and spacesuits.

An engineer who liked to make things

De Mestral was born on 19 June 1907, in a village near Lausanne, Switzerland. The Hall of Fame says he filed his first patent, for a toy aeroplane, at 12. He studied electrical engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and graduated in 1930.

So the man who looked at the burr was trained to ask how things work. The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center, quoted by History.com, describes the burrs under his lens as looking “like a monster’s mouthful of spiked fangs”.

From one hook to a strip of tape

The principle was simple: one surface covered in hooks, another covered in loops, pressed together. Making it was not.

The Lemelson-MIT programme says his first hooks and loops were the wrong sizes. He worked with a weaver in France; the Hall of Fame names a fabric manufacturer in Lyon. Cotton was tried first and, History.com reports, wore out too quickly. Nylon turned out to be the answer. History.com, drawing on the children’s author Dorna Schroeter, says de Mestral designed a loom to weave loops and then trimmed the tops off some with scissors to make hooks.

He named the result from two French words: velours (velvet) and crochet (hook). Velcro is a brand name; as Smithsonian Magazine notes, the thing itself is technically called hook-and-loop fastener.

A flop, then a lift-off

De Mestral expected it to be everywhere, fashion included. Smithsonian Magazine says that at launch it flopped. High-end designers would not touch it, and History.com says few people at first took him seriously.

The first enthusiasts were in aerospace. History.com says NASA took an interest in the early 1960s, to keep objects in place in zero gravity. NASA says it held snack pouches and drink bags on the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions, and that some astronauts had a small patch inside the emergency feed port of their suits for scratching their noses. Skiing and scuba diving followed.

The Lemelson-MIT programme says de Mestral set up Velcro Industries and was soon selling more than 60 million yards (about 55 million metres) a year. He later sold his rights to the company, and died on 8 February 1990.

Why it took others to make it ordinary

Smithsonian Magazine argues that the real breakthrough came when the patent ran out on 2 April 1978 and rivals were free to copy it. By the 1980s it was on children’s shoes and holding car interiors together. In 1984 the talk-show host David Letterman, in a Velcro suit, threw himself at a Velcro wall on late-night television.

A chairman of Velcro USA, William Krivsky, gave the magazine a frank verdict on the protected years: “If you have a protected position, you don’t run quite as hard as if someone is chasing you.”

Where the accounts differ

The burr is in every version. Almost everything around it moves.

• The outing. The Hall of Fame calls it a walk in the woods with his dog, an Irish pointer. History.com calls it a hunting trip in the Alpine countryside. Smithsonian Magazine, citing Mental Floss, says skiing. Lemelson-MIT says hiking. None of the four names the dog.
• The year. The Hall of Fame, History.com and Smithsonian give 1941; Lemelson-MIT gives no year.
• The patent. The Hall of Fame and Lemelson-MIT say he patented it in 1955. Smithsonian says it was first patented in 1958. A 1958 grant fits its 1978 expiry date. Different countries’ patents may explain the gap, but none of the four pages says so.
• How long it took. History.com says nearly a decade. From a 1941 walk to a 1955 patent is 14 years.

What is not in doubt is the order of things: he noticed, he looked closely, and then he spent years on the dull part.

For another material that started in a lab and ended up everywhere, read how Stephanie Kwolek found Kevlar. For an everyday object with a famous origin story of its own, see Percy Shaw and the cat’s eye.