For most people it’s impossible to imagine life without a zipper. Really. How would you close your pants? Buttons? What about your purse? What about your laptop bag? Zippers are everywhere. Yet, believe it or not, it wasn’t until just before the second World War that they got popular. Some of us still have relatives who grew up in the age before zippers. That’s weird, right?
It’s only been 100 years or so. Unbelievable, right?
The modern zipper was invented around 1913 as a replacement for awful hook-and-eye fasteners (if you don’t know what those are, that tells you how much better zippers are.) It was an improvement over earlier work done by an engineer named Gideon Sundback. What Sundback did was take the fasteners used at the time and build in the “slide” so that they automatically mated. This made opening and closing things much faster and easier.
What’s amazing is that the zipper didn’t take the world by storm right away. It was not looked at as something worth the extra manufacturing cost. It would take another twenty years for zippers to have their “killer app.” The first known widespread use of the zipper wasn’t in pants, it was in… rubber boots.
Rubber boots?
Rubber boots were a pretty high-tech item back in the 1920s. I mean, think about a world where your feet are always wet. A pair of galoshes must have seemed like the coolest thing ever. They were hard to get on and off though, and by the 1930s someone thought to put a zipper on rubber boots. It was then that the zipper, once known by the catchy name of “hookless fastener” got its name. Goodrich’s “zipper boots” were so named for the sound they made while closing, and while zippers themselves are known for not sticking, the name stuck quite nicely.
It was another decade or so before zippers started appearing in clothing, and they first showed up on children’s clothes because kids had trouble buttoning or lacing their pants. (Lacing their pants!) It wasn’t long before the zipper was everywhere.
Zippers, like every other technical innovation of the early 20th century, got a lot of exposure during the Second World War. This was a time of great technical innovation. Factories were improving their processes so they could turn out massive amounts of goods for a well-paying customer (the government.) It was also the first time that some people experienced clothing with a zipper. As you can imagine, no one wanted to go back to buttons, hooks, or laces.
Beat it, beat it…
The height of the zipper’s popularity was 40 years later when multiple, largely useless, zippers started appearing on clothing. It’s hard to think of 1980s clothes like this red leather jacket without thinking of the multiple zippers on them. Yes, today the zipper has slipped back into doing honest yeoman’s work, keeping your clothes fastened. But for a while they were high fashion
Zippers in the future (real or imagined)
Take a look at the 1960s Star Trek, often thought of as the most common vision of the future, and you’ll see no zippers. Creator Gene Roddenberry famously decreed that in the future there would be no zippers for some reason. The wardrobe had them, though. They were just cleverly hidden within the fabric.
On the other hand, zippers are a critical part of operations in space in the real world. You’ll find zippers on the outfits of astronauts (not on spacesuits, since they let air through) and all over the international space station. Zippers have arrived, and you know it when they’ve gone into earth orbit before most of us have
It’s just hard to imagine that the humble zipper has been around barely 100 years and we can’t live without it. Just something to think about.
