This Day in Invention History (Zip-Pid-Dee-Doo-Dah for the “Clasp Locker”)

August 29, 1893—More often than not, a major element of modern life takes a while to evolve—and seldom more so than in the case of the humble but necessary zipper, which on this date took a step forward with the patenting of a “clasp locker.”

Millions put pants on every day without a clue how the essential mechanism that holds it together came into being. Oh, sure, we know that back in the Stone Age, some hirsute Neanderthals went around in furs that would never have made it onto anyone’s best-dressed list, sort of like the not-yet-evolved man-apes running around at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But aside from that, we guys assume that this apparatus was always there. I mean, really—after George Washington had quenched his thirst with a mug of rum (his favorite drinks: rum-laced eggnog and rum punch), how was he supposed to take care of his bodily functions?

The first step toward the zipper as we know it occurred in 1851, when Elias Howe patented an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure.”

A-Triple C. I love the sound of that! With a talent for snappy abbreviations, Howe might have made a great sports-page editor, conjuring up an athlete’s major qualities in pungent initials, or maybe he’d be even better as a Washington bureaucrat during the New Deal, when alphabet-soup agencies were all the rage (AAA, CCC, NRA, TVA, FCC, CWA, ad infinitum).

But instead he was a 19th-century Yankee, grimly focused on rescuing women like his wife, who had taken on sewing work in a desperate attempt to pay the family’s bills when he had become sick. He couldn’t think about the next invention when he was busy battling predators who disregarded his patent on his one for the sewing machine. So the A-Triple C would have to wait.

Fast forward 42 years. There was a guy with a back so balky that it wouldn’t let him tie his shoes. Only this guy had a Chicago buddy, Whitcomb L. Judson, who was really handy, with a dozen patents—and not just little stuff, but things like motors and railroad braking systems. If he could do so much for so many people, Judson surely realized, why couldn’t he help a pal?

So he set to work on an alternative to those lengthy, godawful shoelaces in men’s and women’s boots of the time. The result: a “clasp locker.”

“Did it work?” you ask. Well, to paraphrase a guy in the news again this week: It depends on what your definition of “work” is.

Okay, so the device—a complicated hook-and-eye fastener—jammed sometimes. I suppose, under certain circumstances, that could be considered a problem, like if you wanted to get somewhere in a hurry. Maybe that accounted for why, when Judson displayed the item at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that year, people were curious, but not really agog. But come on—it did work well enough that Judson and his business associate, Col. Lewis Walker, sewed it into their own booths.

Still, the firm that Judson and Walker formed, Universal Fastener, didn’t really run to the races in the 16 years between the patent and Judson’s death. It took another Universal Fastener employee, a Swedish-born inventor named Gideon Sundback, to come up with a refinement.

It came about like this: The death of Sundback’s wife plunged him into a deep depression. Now, if his story had been filmed by Ingmar Bergman, the picture would have grown progressively more somber and grayer until, in the last reel, if you were still awake or not yet committed to a year’s worth of psychoanalysis, you would have noticed the light had completely gone out of the frame.

But this was the early 20th century, which took many of its precepts from American President Theodore Roosevelt, himself once a grief-stricken young widower who had gone off to the Dakotas after his wife and mother had died within 24 hours of each other.

In other words, Sundback got busy.

By 1913, he had come up with a “hookless fastener.” The device, featuring interlocking “teeth,” is pretty much the one we know today, but for a few refinements.

Which refinements? Well, like the word “zipper” itself. It came about by accident, when an executive at B.F. Goodrich, which decided to make galoshes with Sundback’s fasteners, slid the fastener up and down the boot saying, “zip ‘er up,” imitating the sound he heard—and giving birth to what was, for a time, a trademark. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the term began to be used for other kinds of apparel, spearheaded by French fashion designers acclaiming its use in men’s trousers.

At one point in the “Battle of the Fly” between the zipper and the button, Esquire Magazine even went so far as to claim that with the zipper, men would not have to experience “The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray.” This, of course, was before the concept of a male wardrobe disaster had sunk into the collective consciousness.