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A Dog Walk and Sticky Burrs Gave Us Velcro: The True Story of George de Mestral
The true story of George de Mestral, the Swiss engineer who invented Velcro after a walk with his dog. In the summer of 1941 he came home from the Jura mountains covered in burdock burrs. Under a microscope he saw hundreds of tiny hooks catching on the loops of the fabric. People laughed at his idea of a fastener made the same way. With a weaver in Lyon he spent years trying, until he found that nylon sewn under hot infrared light formed tough little hooks. He named it Velcro, from the French words for velvet and hook. Tailors thought it looked cheap, but NASA used it on the Apollo missions…
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