Ask Mike: Who Invented Velcro?
Hey Guys,
Inventors amaze me. To come up with a completely original concept and then realize it is an incredible accomplishment. Of all the wonderful inventions out there, I find Velcro to be among the most marvelous.
I went searching for its creator, thinking I may have to do a lot of research. Not so. I quickly learned that Velcro was invented by a man named George De Mestral and he has quite a devoted online following.
De Mestral was a Swiss engineer and avid outdoorsman. According to Engology, De Mestral was walking in the forest with his dog one day when he noticed a lot of burrs stuck to his clothes and in his dog’s fur. He looked at the burrs under a microscope and noticed that they had thousands of tiny hooks. An idea was born.
After years of trial and error, de Mestral developed a finished product that had the same characteristics of hooks and loops (or fur and burrs, if you prefer). For his considerable effort, he was later voted into the Inventors Hall of Fame. Today, the Velco Company makes “hundreds of different hook and loop products that can solve just about any fastening problem.” It’s even used to anchor equipment on the Space Shuttle. Good thing De Mestral had a dog who liked to go for walks or Velcro might have never happened.
Do you guys have a favorite invention? Something you wish you’d come up with? Leave a comment below and let me know (and TV doesn’t count).
Thanks for reading,
p.s. — Curious about why its named “Velcro“? It’s a combination of the words “velour” and “crochet.”
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I’ve never meet the man, but I understand he lives in a big house in Sterling City, Texas. I also heard that velcro was 1st used by the military before releasing it to the public.
Didn’t you mean the “VELCRO company”?
The paper clip. The thimble is good runner up.
thta’s a cool story about the invention of velcro
the stapler is a good invention
We mustn’t forget the immortal, inimitable Silly Putty!
Toilet paper! Or Jibbitz!
Some weirdo with a strange sense of humor
(I can’t stand it because it sticks on everything)
George de Mestral a Swiss amateur-mountaineer and inventor decided to take his dog for a nature hike one lovely summer day in 1948. They both returned covered with burrs. de Mestral inspected one of the burrs under his microscope and was inspired to use the same mechanism for a fastener. Mestral’s idea met with resistance and even laughter, but the inventor ‘stuck’ by his invention. Together with a weaver from a textile plant in France, Mestal perfected his hook and loop fastener. By trial and error, he realized that nylon when sewn under infrared light, formed tough hooks for the burr side of the fastener. This finished the design, patented in 1955. The inventor formed Velcro Industries to manufacture his invention. Mestral was selling over sixty million yards of Velcro per year. Today it is a multi-million dollar industry.
A sheep herder I heard was pulling burdocks from his sheep when he got the idea…
my friends dad knew the guy
I always heard that velcro was invented by NASA to keep things from floating everywhere in space.
WD-40
WD stands for water displacement; the 40 stands for the number of different formulations attempted before hitting on what is one of the most popular lubricants sold today. The space program was the driver behind this invention.
Try http://www.protomine.com (protomine.com) if you need invention development for a new invention idea. They offer reasonable prices and are pretty fast. Anyway, they did a great job on my design.
a man was walking wit his dog and got anydye bye some plant and then did some thing to inveent it
I wish I had invented the refigerator, the dishwasher, the washer/dryer, and the freezer appliance that is used in the meat/cheese/milk aisle.
Don’t really have a favorite invention. But I do have a favorite inventor, and that would be Thomas Edison. The man was a freakin’ genius.