The Zipper 1804

        This is weird, when I had this idea about writing a post on the zipper, after doing my research and writing my post, I decided to find an image of a zipper on Google images. The first thing that came up was Google's image for the celebration of the 132nd birthday of Gideon Sundback. Read on and find out who he was.
        So there I was this morning, closing the zipper on my jacket when I wondered who invented the zipper? The zipper may be one of the best things ever invented. I remember my navy dress blue trousers with the 13 button flap which was great looking, but not so good when on liberty slurping down the beers and having to loosen those 13 buttons every trip to the restroom. Everything in the navy back then had buttons except for the jumpers which were slipped over one’s head. That was not an issue except for those who had their head up their asses.
        The history of the zipper is somewhat shaky because several people were involved in the process of development. What I found was this: the first concept was created by Elais (don’t hear that name much anymore) Howe in 1851. He never tried to market the closure. He called it the “Automatic continuous clothing closure”. 1893 Witcomb Justin came out with his “Clasp Locker” which was similar to the old-fashioned shoe clasps on some high-top galoshes. In 1901 Witcomb reorganised his company and hired Gideon Sundback as his engineer. That company is now known as Talon. In 1913 after the death of Sundback’s wife, he immersed himself into finding a better type of closure. In December of 1913 Sunback created his “hookless fastener”, in 1914 it was modified and called the “separable fastener” which received a patent in 1917. You might think that is the end of the story, but no, as Paul Harvey used to say, “and now, the rest of the story.”
        The popularity of the separable fastener began to grow and in 1923 the B. F. Goodrich company began to use the separable fastener on their line of galoshes. The term zipper comes from the sound those galoshes made as the separable fastener was “zipped up.” Now you know the history of the zipper.