Velcro was invented by copying the burrs that stuck to a dog's fur
After a walk in the woods, a Swiss engineer put the maddening seed pods under a microscope and found a fastener.
In 1941, Swiss engineer George de Mestral returned from a walk near Lausanne to find his trousers and his Irish Pointer’s coat coated in burdock burrs. Annoyed but curious, he examined one under a microscope and saw the secret of its grip: thousands of tiny hooks that snagged on the looped fibres of cloth and fur.
De Mestral set out to copy nature — pairing a strip of hooks with a strip of loops. It proved fiendishly hard. Cotton wore out too quickly, so he switched to nylon, working with a weaver in Lyon to get hooks both flexible enough to release and firm enough to hold.
The project took the better part of a decade. He named the result Velcro, blending the French velours (velvet) and crochet (hook), and patented it in 1955.
It became a textbook case of biomimicry — solving a human problem by imitating a design found in nature.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
