Gideon Sundback patents the modern zipper
On this day · 29 April
On 29 April 1913, a Swedish-born engineer in Hoboken won the U.S. patent for the interlocking-tooth design behind every zipper today.
Earlier slide fasteners snagged, popped open, and rusted shut. The breakthrough came from Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-born electrical engineer working for the Automatic Hook and Eye Company. He scrapped the old hook-and-eye approach for two facing rows of identical interlocking teeth, drawn together and apart by a single sliding cam.
On 29 April 1913, the U.S. Patent Office granted his “Separable Fastener” patent, filed five years earlier. The design was reliable enough to mass-produce: Sundback also built the machine to make it, and by late 1913 the company’s Meadville, Pennsylvania plant was turning out roughly a thousand fasteners a day.
It was not yet called a zipper. That name came in 1923, when B.F. Goodrich used the fasteners on rubber boots.
Sundback kept refining the mechanism, earning a second, better-known patent in 1917. But the 1913 grant is the one celebrated as the birth of the modern zipper, and 29 April is now marked as National Zipper Day.
Sources & references
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