The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to Be as They Are.

by Henry Petroski

  Even with the advantage that they were less likely than hooks to snag, buttons definitely still took some time to be mated with buttonholes. Nevertheless, an abundance of buttons on garments became a sign of fashion in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe; and the contrasting dressing customs of privileged men and privileged women of that time are generally believed to be responsible for the fact that even today men’s clothes button differently from women’s. Since, presumptively, most people have always preferred the right hand, a man dressing himself would naturally have favored his right hand for manipulating a button through a buttonhole. Hence, the buttons on men’s garments, even if at first attached randomly to one side or the other, would soon have migrated to the man’s right-hand side. The most fashionable women, however, were commonly dressed by maids, who naturally faced their mistresses while hooking or buttoning them up. Therefore, buttons would have migrated to the side of a lady’s garment that corresponded to the facing maid’s right. Any other arrangement would have been inefficient.

  Whatever the origins of their orientation, buttons on garments could generally each be fastened relatively quickly. Yet there tended to be so many of them, for a tight closure could not be achieved unless the buttons were very closely spaced, and this was especially important for shoes. But the fingers were not a very effective tool for coaxing the crowded buttons through small buttonholes, and so the buttonhook—a crooked little metal finger—was developed to reach through the buttonhole, grasp the button, and pull it through. With practice, this action could be done quickly and thus had distinct advantages over laces. (Snap fasteners were invented in the nineteenth century and provided the further advantage of being quicker to close and open, and without a special tool, but they were not so strong as button or lace fastenings, and hence not so suitable for shoes, and they tended to wear out faster with repeated use.)

  High-button shoes were not only fashionable in the nineteenth century, they were very practical for walking about unpaved streets that were alternately dusty and muddy and always littered with the droppings of horses. But chief among their shortcomings must have been the time it took to button shoes up, for, no matter how deft one could become with a buttonhook, it would take time and attention to insert the hook in each of the twenty-odd holes, hook each of the twenty-odd buttons, pull each button through its buttonhole, and release it with the proper twist of the hook before continuing on. And that would only have fastened one shoe. Although the design of the very specialized hook itself shows little variation, the many handle designs attest that this indispensable utilitarian tool was soon as common and yet as individualized an object on a lady’s dresser as was the dinner fork on her table. If buttons should come undone during the day, one might have to have a buttonhook at the ready, and so designs for the purse also multiplied. Yet, because buttoning shoes was something done every day by everyone, including those with inventive turns of mind and dreams of striking it rich, any disadvantage of the process provided a problem to attack.

  Though not needed in any absolute sense, the ultimate shoe fastener might be imagined to be one that closed and opened in a single action that took as little time as possible and even less attention. Just as such a device would be invented in response to the shortcomings of the existing scheme for fastening shoes, so the shortcomings of successive stages of the invention itself would drive its perfection. But the process would take decades and not a little money and patience from financial backers.

  Something recognizable as a zipper was patented in 1851 by Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine. But Howe’s “automatic continuous clothing closure,” which consisted of “a series of clasps united by a connecting cord running or sliding upon ribs,” was never marketed, and the idea seems to have been forgotten for almost half a century. Indeed, the zipper as we know it today did not begin a fruitful line of evolution until the last decade of the nineteenth century, even though inventors and people from all walks of life were daily reminded of the frustrations of fastening high-button shoes. Once they were put on and buttoned, the feet were imprisoned for the day, unless one wanted to redo several dozen buttons, a task to be avoided even with the assistance of a buttonhook. There appeared to be no more hope of speeding up the buttoning process than there was of accelerating the insertion of a line of hooks in their respective eyes, for the motion of inserting individual hooks into mating eyes, or buttons into mating buttonholes, was across the gap to be closed, whereas the motion of the hand in progressing to close the gap was along it.

  The idea of arranging a chain of clasps that could be opened and closed automatically with the single motion of a movable guide that could be slid along the seam was the brainstorm of a mechanical engineer from the Midwest who at one time was being granted patents at the rate of two per year, many for such things as engines and transmissions. In addition to improving the speed and efficiency of the young automobile, Whitcomb Judson was hopeful that with his slider device a simple rapid motion could close and unclose the seams in high-topped shoes. A drawing on one of Judson’s first patents for an early zipper actually reveals wire hooks that are pulled together and locked across the seam by an advancing slider. A second patent, issued the same day in 1893, shows a variation on the fastening device, embodying “certain new and useful Improvements in Clasp Lockers and Unlockers for Shoes, &c.” The word “zipper” would not be used to describe such a device for three decades.

  But even the snappiest of names would not have been sufficient to bring the invention to fruition, for in the 1890s, as in the 1990s, an engineer with a patent was nothing more than that, if there was no capital to develop and market the idea. Fortunately, Judson had earlier met Lewis Walker, a young lawyer from western Pennsylvania, who had become interested in the inventor’s idea for a street railway system powered by compressed air. The scheme seemed promising for the transportation of oil and coal, which Walker knew would interest his Pennsylvania banker brother-in-law, whose family had benefited greatly from the 1859 discovery of oil in their own backyard. The welcome capital enabled Judson to set up experimental versions of his compression railway in Washington, D.C., and New York City, but the growing application of electric power soon pushed aside schemes like Judson’s, and the growing failure of businesses left Walker’s in-laws in financial disarray. In the meantime, Walker had come into some money from his father and became interested in one of Judson’s more pedestrian devices.

  The first patent for a “clasp locker or unlocker for shoes” was issued to Whitcomb Judson of Chicago in 1893 and was illustrated with a buttonless shoe. The invention was motivated by the long-familiar complaint that high-buttoned shoes took so much time to put on and take off. (photo credit 6.3)

  Judson had exhibited his new invention at the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 and wore on his boots a prototype of the clasp lockers. As soon as Walker saw them, he was convinced of their promise. He had clasp lockers installed on his own boots, and in 1894 set up the Universal Fastener Company with Judson and another partner from the compression-railway venture. Judson continued to work on the clasp locker and took out further patents in 1896, now referring to the device as a fastener, but even the latest model looked bulky, and this limited its appeal to shoe manufacturers. The fastener was sewn into mailbags, but the government had put only twenty into service by the end of 1897. Other applications were sought, and the use of the fasteners in leggings pleased Colonel Walker, who had come to be called that because of his longtime commitment to the National Guard. He had for some time felt his uniform lacked military smartness, and he hoped the clasp fastener would make for a better fit.

  But while the financial partners were calculating the profit promised by each new application of the fastener, the engineer Judson was working to “perfect the details,” including those of the machinery that would have to mass-produce the fastener if it was to be truly profitable. The application of the fastener to corsets, for example, required it to separate at bo
th ends, and so Judson had to develop a new starting device, since the slider on the original design did not allow the ends to be separated. A saddened Colonel Walker once remarked that “Judson’s way of meeting a difficulty was to add invention after invention to his already large supply,” but Walker knew as well as Judson that with each new application the shortcomings of the last design were likely to become more evident. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no end to the chain, as the engineer tackled more and more ambitious problems: “Judson’s activities were expensive. They tended to create more problems than they solved.”

  One of Judson’s new machines was invented in 1901, and it was to “connect a series of fastening elements—hooks and links—automatically into a kind of chain,” but the machine proved too complicated to be useful. With investors disheartened, the Universal Fastener Company became dormant, and even before the new machine would be patented, a new company was formed, the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company. Under this company, the fastener continued to be developed, and eventually, “instead of linking the fastening elements directly in a chain, Judson clamped them along the beaded edge of a fabric.” This not only removed the complications of prior processes, but, more important, “the finished product could be attached to a garment by a sewing machine. Gone was the tedious necessity of having to sew each link of the old chain fastener to a garment by hand.” Thus, another shortcoming was removed.

  One of a long series of alternate forms of Whitcomb Judson’s slide fastener was patented in 1896. Though each version of the fastener appeared to have advantages over earlier ones, frustration in manufacturing and using the devices kept them from really catching on. The difficulty Judson faced in perfecting the slide fastener is suggested by the fact that no one but he was issued a related patent until after 1905. (photo credit 6.4)

  In 1904 the name of the firm was changed to Automatic Hook and Eye Company, largely because the fastener Judson had finally come up with as suitable for general marketing had fastening elements that resembled old hooks and eyes, but with the hooks pointing along the seam to be closed. The new automatic fastener was called C-curity, to emphasize its advantages over the hooks and eyes that had to be sewn on and closed and opened individually—certainly not automatically—but that too often popped open at inopportune times. Advertisements for the new C-curity fastener celebrated its advantages: “A pull and it’s done! No more open skirts … Your skirt is always securely and neatly fastened.” The device was also termed a “placket fastener,” because, according to the company’s etymology, “the word placket itself meant woman when it first came into the language. Later it was applied to the slit made in a garment to facilitate putting it on, and in that sense it still is used by the trade.”

  Unfortunately, for all its names and advertising claims, the C-curity fastener was itself notorious for “popping open at the most inconvenient moments. Worse, when such an accident occurred, the slider became locked in its position at the end of the chain. The only way to get the garment off was to cut it off or cut the fastener out.” Furthermore, according to the company’s own history, operating the devices wasn’t as easy as “a pull and it’s done”:

  A leaflet printed in March, 1906, tacitly confessed to many difficulties. The instructions for applying the fastener were wordy and complicated. The sponsors of C-curity betrayed their own lack of security by stating: “Customers will confer a favor on us by reporting any difficulty in applying fastener, in which case we will send more detailed instructions.” The “instructions for using” were not merely wordy but worried.

  As with all artifacts, it was the difficulties encountered in using each successive version of the automatic fastener that led to modifications designed to remove those difficulties. And in this case the modifications had evolved the form back very close to the hook and eye that had generated its departure. Judson had followed a long, circuitous route before he turned his hooks and eyes so that they were oriented along pieces of beaded tape, and, like many an impatient inventor familiar with the habits of his own maturing brainchild, he was able to get it to work pretty well in the laboratory. But customers were not so gentle with the inventor’s baby and used it the way it was advertised to be used. And the manufacturer knew they would, because the customers were being asked to help identify problems and difficulties the engineer Judson either could not identify or overlooked in his zeal. But “the hook and eye principle, as applied to the fastener, never ceased to be a complete nuisance,” and if the Automatic Hook and Eye Company was ever to succeed, it had to respond to the objections to the device that was central to its name. Either better hooks and eyes would have to be fashioned into automatic fasteners that worked reliably, or the hooks and eyes would have to be replaced by something further evolved mechanically.

  The man who was to accomplish what Judson did not was born in Sweden in 1880 and named Otto Frederick Gideon Sundback. His parents owned rich farm and timber lands and so were able to send their technically inclined son to school in Germany, where he received his electrical-engineering degree in 1903. After returning home to fulfill his military service, young Sundback emigrated to the United States, where at the time there were few engineering schools but a growing industrial economy that demanded engineers. Sundback dropped as many of the European trappings of his name as practicable, preferring to be known simply as G. Sundback, and found a job with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation near Pittsburgh, where he worked on designs for the giant turbo-generators for the Niagara Falls power plant.

  Pittsburgh was not far from Meadville, Pennsylvania, where most of the financial backers of the Automatic Hook and Eye Company resided, and Sundback’s path eventually crossed some of theirs. He was having troubles with his superior at Westinghouse, and so agreed to visit Automatic’s factory in Hoboken, New Jersey, for an interview. There he met P. A. Aronson, a highly skilled mechanic whose job it was “to keep Judson’s machine running long enough and steadily enough so that its defects could be diagnosed and cured.” While in Hoboken, Sundback evidently also met Aronson’s daughter, Elvira, whom he later married. Whether for love or the dream of money or the simple fascination and complex challenge of the automatic fastener, in about 1908 Sundback began what was to be a long association with Automatic Hook and Eye and its descendants. The official version is: “His shrewd eye caught some of the defects of manufacture, but the technical expert within him said that the defects could be corrected and the perfectionist within him demanded the opportunity to do so. He took the job.”

  In Sundback’s own words, he became “fully saturated” with the problems of the fastener and he often lay awake half the night “trying to find a way out.” He first tackled the C-curity fastener’s “trick of popping open” and developed an extension of the eye to enclose the hook completely. Since “C-curity had damaged the company’s prestige” so, the improved placket fastener was quickly marketed under the name Plako as “the C-curity Fastener made perfect,” even before a patent application was filed. (U.S. Patent No. 1,060,378, issued in 1913, is now often taken as the milestone marking the introduction of the zipper.) Advertising copy proclaimed that “buttons, hooks and clasps are disappearing before Plako,” but the company’s euphoria proved to be short-lived. Sundback himself told the “rueful story of how the secretary of the company had gone out one evening with a Plako in his trousers and had to hurry home seeking a safety pin.” There were many failings still to overcome, and “complaints piled up on the engineer’s table.”

  Though Automatic Hook and Eye owned the patent rights in the United States, the company had agreed that Sundback would retain foreign rights. By 1910 his father-in-law was in Paris and had found backing for a French factory to make “Le Ferme-Tout Américain,” but World War I interrupted the enterprise. Things were going badly in America as well, with the passing of the days of steel at five cents per pound and labor at six dollars a week. The staff at Automatic Hook and Eye had been reduced to Sundback and one other person, and
Sundback served as executive, engineer, factory superintendent, and office boy. Thus it was he who had to convince a salesman to supply more raw materials when several thousand dollars was already owed to John A. Roebling’s Sons, the company that has provided steel wire for everything from failing fasteners to successful suspension bridges. To pay printing bills, Sundback repaired a printer’s machines and on one occasion created for him a machine for making paper clips. But there also seemed always to be new backers appearing at the doorstep. James O’Neill, the father of the playwright, was a quick-change artist who toured the country playing in The Count of Monte Cristo and thought the Plako fastener was a godsend. O’Neill bought stock in the company and took an interest in developments.

  In contrast to such support, Sundback suffered terrible personal setbacks. He was crushed when Elvira died following childbirth, and could go on in his intense grief only by giving his total attention over to the problems with the fastener. He eventually took “a radical departure from all previous forms the device had taken,” and focused on eliminating the troublesome hooks that had always proved “fatal” to the design:

  To one side of his new model he now put spring clips or jaws which clamped around a beaded edge of the tape on the other side. The slider was designed to wedge these clips apart, in its upward progress, and force the beaded edge into the opened jaws. The jaws then snapped around the bead.… Exit the hook.

  Perhaps Sundback got the idea while working on the machine to make paper clips. But, whatever the inspiration, a patent for this new slide fastener was applied for in 1912 and granted in 1917. Colonel Walker was delighted and fascinated with early handmade samples and called the mechanism the “hidden hook.” But Sundback was less sanguine in letters to the Colonel, reminding him that finances were so low that the factory had been shut down: “There is hardly any doubt in my mind that the new hidden hook will replace Plako, but before we get ready to fill orders we will want some stock and facilities to manufacture the hidden hook and that is a few months off still.” And a few weeks later he wrote: