How A Pair Of Socks And A Dog Helped Invent Touch Fasteners

There are several materials that are crucial to modern trade workwear, but one that is often unheralded despite its critical importance is the hook-and-loop fastener, often known simply as velcro.

Used on pretty much everything from jackets to helmets, velcro is used to make personal protective equipment easy to put on, easy to take off in an emergency situation and can be used to make the fit tighter to avoid loose clothing causing a hazard.

It is an essential part of hard hats to ensure they stay secured to the head during more intense work and keep workers protected from falling objects and blows to the head, but what is fascinating is the bizarre time and place where velcro was ultimately invented.

It is a story about a man, his dog and his pair of woollen socks.

A Tale Of George And Milka

Born in Lausanne, George de Mestral (1907-1990) was a prodigious inventor and electrical engineer who at the age of 12 was given his first patent.

Over three decades later, whilst working for an engineering company’s machine shop, he indulged in hunting, one of his other passions, and in doing so accidentally made a remarkable discovery.

Travelling with his dog, Milka, they travelled through a wooded part of the Alps and found that throughout their journey a lot of flying burdock seeds ended up getting stuck on his clothing and poor Milka’s fur.

Curiosity struck him as to why they were constantly getting stuck, so he took a few home and examined them under a microscope.

There, he found that there were hundreds of tiny hooks that would snag onto anything that had a loop, such as hair or clothing.

This ignited a spark of ingenuity from the inventor; if he could somehow find a way to duplicate the hooks and loops, he could create a reversible way to stick two materials together that was less awkward than laces and less permanent than glue.

The first problem was working out which materials would do this best, not helped by the fact that few took his idea seriously at first. After several natural fibres simply wore out too quickly, he opted instead for nylon, which formed hooks when exposed to the heat of infrared light.

The process of mechanising the process was far trickier however, and from that fateful walk in the Alps to a completed velcro manufacturing process, it took a decade to create a system for making velcro, finally patenting it in 1951.

He was adamant that it would be adopted almost immediately, but it would take a lot longer than he would expect for everyone else to catch on, despite some early interest from journalists such as Sylvia Porter.

The reason for this was less its impressive technology nor its functionality but instead its look, something that has not changed much in the decades since.

However, once it started to see use by astronauts and scuba divers, the potential became clear. 

Such was the importance of the Space Programme to its popularity that it has since become a common misnomer that NASA themselves invented it.

Now it is seen on almost any practical clothing, still as vital and important as the day the idea was caught onto Milka’s fur in 1941.