Unzipped: The Surprisingly Twisted History of the Zipper

In 1893, a man named Whitcomb Judson patented a device called the "Clasp Locker." It took another twenty-two years before that invention—what we call a zipper—actually worked without constantly failing. Failing is putting it mildly. Judson's device was a catastrophe. It was this clumsy hook-and-eye system meant for shoes, and it would pop open or jam constantly. The company he founded, the Universal Fastener Company, was bleeding money. They hired a Swedish-American electrical engineer, Gideon Sundback, to try and fix it. And that's where everything changes. So Sundback is the real hero of the zipper. Not the first guy. He IS the hero! Because he realized the hook-and-eye idea was a dead end.

He threw it out. After years of work, in 1913 he created the "Hookless No. 2." Instead of hooks, it had these tiny, identical, interlocking teeth. Each tooth has a little dimple on the bottom and a little scoop on the top. The slider—that Y-shaped channel—forces the scoops of one side into the dimples of the other at a perfect angle. It’s a mechanical miracle of precision. Okay, so now it works. It’s reliable. So then it’s on every pair of pants in America, right? No! Absolutely not. For years, nobody wanted it. This is the part that drives me crazy. The best analogy is the early automobile. The first cars were seen as loud, smelly, unreliable toys for the rich.

People trusted the horse. In the same way, tailors and the public trusted buttons. The zipper felt… vulgar. Mechanical. It was relegated to rubber boots and tobacco pouches. So it was a solution to a problem nobody thought they had. Exactly. It wasn't seen as an improvement, it was seen as a risk. The thing that broke the dam was World War One. The U.S. Navy started using zippers on flying suits and money belts because they were fast and secure. Suddenly, you have hundreds of thousands of soldiers using this thing every single day. And that mass adoption is what made it normal. It proved it worked. It proved it worked, and it made it cool. The soldiers came home, and the idea of a zipper wasn't strange anymore.

By the 1930s, Esquire magazine was promoting trousers with zippers as a new idea for menswear. The revolution took forty years, and it had to go through a world war to get there. It’s a reminder that even the most brilliant engineering is useless until culture decides it’s ready.