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

  It doesn’t seem to me that the hidden hook is right for the trade as yet even if the steel and tape were right as to quality. I have found weak points. The catching is quite serious and can only be remedied through some additions to the outside which may give it a rather clumsy appearance.

  In spite of the engineer’s worries over everything ranging from performance to aesthetics, Colonel Walker still was not discouraged. However, by 1913 some of the early patents were close to running out, and so the financial backers were interested in reorganizing the company. At their annual meeting, the stockholders in Automatic Hook and Eye agreed to sell all the company’s assets, and the Hookless Fastener Company came into existence shortly thereafter. Sundback moved the factory from Hoboken to a little barn in Meadville, which paid scant attention to the fact that “an obscure company, engaged in the manufacture of an unfamiliar gadget, had come to town.” But many of those who knew of Walker’s obsession with hookless fasteners and the like, on seeing him coming down the street, would whisper to their companions, “Cross over quickly. Here comes the Colonel. He’ll try to sell us shares in his gadget.” In the meantime, Sundback made the best of his cramped quarters and “set about redesigning his machinery, making innumerable experiments.”

  Sundback had been anxious to get down to work after the move to Meadville, for, although he was disappointed in the spring-clips device, which had come to be known as Hookless No. 1, he had since come up with a new scheme, Hookless No. 2—another “radical departure in principle from the design of earlier slide fasteners.” This one he described as being “built up of nested, cup-shaped members.” Furthermore, Sundback also accomplished, in the essential machine for making the device, a simplicity to match the fastener’s operation. “The interlocking members could be stamped out of metal in one process.” When he announced this breakthrough to his backers in December 1913, Sundback confessed that he had never known men to “take anything so calmly,” but he also knew that the Colonel especially had never doubted that the fastener concept would someday work, and so, when it did, it was anticlimactic.

  The history and operation of the slide fastener was once the cover story for Scientific American. While descriptions of the machines that now manufacture the indispensable item by the billions take up much of the article, the cover illustration is a closeup of a fastener of essentially the same design as Sundback’s 1913 breakthrough. The slider that usually obscures the operating principle behind the device is removed, and the interlocking teeth are shown in the process of nesting into each other. Each tooth is really shaped somewhat like a deep-bowled spoon, and is more properly called and described as a scoop, for it has been stamped out so that the top is more or less convex and the bottom concave. In the act of closing the fastener, the slider functions as a guide, first pulling the scoops together and then channeling them with just the right orientation so that they alternately nest left into right and right into left as the slider passes over them. When the scoops have all been interlocked, the closing is secure (yet flexible) but can easily be opened by pulling the slider in the opposite direction.

  Gideon Sundback was an engineer recruited in 1906 to develop a reliable slide fastener and the machinery to manufacture it. After working for years with various devices that essentially continued to engage hooks in eyes, in 1913 he came up with the idea for a “hookless fastener.” The first version was as frustrating to deal with as all the others, but the definitive patent, shown here, was finally awarded in 1917. (photo credit 6.5)

  Six months after his announcement of a device based on this new principle, Sundback thought he had all the machinery fine-tuned and everything ready to go into full-scale production. The Colonel had planned a party for the big day, but when the power was turned on, “the fool machine wouldn’t work.” It spat out two inches of fastener and stopped. Eventually it did work, of course, and quantities of Hookless Fastener No. 2 were ready to be sold. But, unlike its predecessor, the Plako, which was “offered merely as a novelty item in a peddler’s pack,” the “Hookless No. 2 was to be sold directly to manufacturers who were in a position to put it into use on a large scale.” Walker knew, however, that he had to point out to the stockholders the problems still to be overcome:

  First, a demand had to be created and then manufacturers of garments and other objects of common use had to be persuaded that the fasteners had become a necessity to them. The demand may be said to have existed for a long time in the unconscious minds of people who were tired of buttons that came off and snaps that wore out and buckles that rattled. But it lay buried under a dead weight of custom and inertia. Manufacturers were positively hostile. They didn’t want to face the many challenges of redesign, of drastic changes in methods of manufacture and, most particularly, of additional cost.

  The “mother of invention” may have been in the unconscious minds of people, but even if inventors sometimes have an Oedipus complex, manufacturers seldom do. Walker was fully aware of what really was operating in the two decades since he had first encountered Whitcomb Judson and the clasp lockers on his shoes. Certainly there were problems with buttons, snaps, and buckles, but there are problems with everything, including hookless fasteners. Until an inventor could come up with something that did not have the problems of the old and that itself had so much promise and, perhaps, pizzazz that its own problems would be overlooked, “necessity” was an unnecessary word. And Walker also knew that, even when Sundback had broken through all the technical roadblocks, some of the greatest obstacles still lay ahead, square in the face of salesmen who had to approach manufacturers and ask them to spend money redesigning their products, their machinery, and their budgets.

  Colonel Walker’s two sons, Lewis Walker, Jr., and Wallace Delamater Walker, were enlisted as missionaries, and the latter sold the first four Hookless Fasteners No. 2 on October 28, 1914. The entire proceeds—one dollar—was placed in an envelope and signed by Sundback, thus culminating eight years of engineering development on his part. He was not the only one who had tried to improve on Judson’s idea of twenty years earlier, of course. There had in fact been a host of others, women as well as men. Josephine Calhoun, of Tampa, Florida, received a patent for a variation on the C-curity that she designed in 1907. That same year, Frank Canfield of Denver, Colorado, came up with a system of claws that closed on spherical knobs. And it was not only in America that inventors were busy. Perhaps the idea closest to Sundback’s final solution was patented by Katharina Kuhn-Moos and Henri Forster of Zurich in 1912. But none of these ideas turned into manufactured products the way the Hookless No. 2 did.

  To a manufacturer, having a warehouse full of fasteners is not as satisfying as having a backlog of orders. And orders for the hookless fastener came very slowly at first. A buyer at McCreery’s Department Store in nearby Pittsburgh called the Hookless “the perfect fastener for skirts and suits,” which saved time for saleswoman and customer alike in the fitting room; she insisted that the fastener be used by garment manufacturers on all skirts made for McCreery’s. But not many buyers followed suit. Few wanted to risk their reputations on Sundback’s untried technology: “It worked perfectly in ideal conditions. It could be produced en masse at a reasonable price. But it still had to be tested by continuous use in the hands of amateurs.” Sundback understood the reluctance of the marketplace, and he was responsive: When the slider proved too weak, he strengthened it. When a new application was hinted, he adapted the Hookless accordingly. But as late as 1915 the Hookless Fastener Company was faced with the question of “how to create a demand … for something which most people had never seen and few had ever dreamed of.” To survive, the company was forced to give assurances to manufacturers originating new applications that no competing product would be supplied with hookless fasteners.

  The manufacturing technology had been all but perfected, with the Meadville factory able to produce 1,630 fasteners a day, and not a single defective one in the batch. But just as orders were beginning to come in, the w
ar slowed the supply of raw materials, and potential customers began to lose interest in the fastener when orders could not be filled promptly. However, the war proved also to be an opportunity, for money belts closed with hookless fasteners sold to army and navy men as fast as the belts could be produced by the Ewing Manufacturing Company, which by mid-1918 was ordering fifty gross of fasteners at a time. Other wartime applications followed, including flying suits for the air corps, which without buttons could be produced with less material and could be made windproof. When the suits were tested by the navy, only the fastener passed. It was soon being used in life-preserving vests, and the government was releasing metal to be made into hookless fasteners.

  But with the Armistice, demand for fasteners declined. There was no more market for money belts and life vests, and the clothing industry was still not interested. Although the Hookless had proved its functional competitiveness, in order to compete successfully with conventional closing devices the fastener had to become competitive in price. Sundback realized that this could only be done through more efficient manufacturing, and so he developed a process that used specially formed wire and what he called the S-L machine. The letters stand for “scrapless,” and the machine in a “continuous operation slices off thin pieces of the Y-shaped wire, puts a pocket on one side of the scoop and a projection on the other, then closes the inner section of each Y-shape around the corded edge of the tape as it is fed into the machine. Result: no waste at all.” In fact, fasteners could be made with only 41 percent of the metal used earlier. Among the first products to benefit from the competitively priced fasteners was the Locktite tobacco pouch, which was advertised as the handiest pouch made, with “no strings—no buttons.” By the end of 1921, shipments of fasteners to the pouch company were exceeding seven thousand per week. Hookless Fastener Company had long since progressed beyond Hookless No. 2 and had added Factory No. 3.

  In 1921 the B. F. Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio, ordered a small number of fasteners. Within a few days of the order’s being filled, Goodrich asked if Hookless could deliver 170,000 fasteners “within the near future.” Since this exceeded the entire output for the previous year, the query was a “stunner,” to say the least, and the order was not filled. The capacity of the factory was already spoken for and, in any case, Goodrich was unwilling to reveal what they wanted the fasteners for. Goodrich continued to ask for small quantities, which it finally confessed it was installing in rubber galoshes in which its clerks were walking around the office—in the heat of summer—to test the durability of the fastener. In the winter of 1922, Goodrich salesmen tested the fasteners in galoshes worn under more inclement conditions. As shortcomings were discovered, they were reported to Hookless engineers for correction. The new Goodrich product was finally announced: “The Mystik Boot with the patented Hookless Fastener. Opens with a pull. Closes with a pull.” But salesmen did not like the name of the boot. It did not suggest a very practical article.

  “Zip” is a word that came into use in the latter part of the nineteenth century to suggest “a light sharp sound such as that produced by a bullet or other small or slender object passing rapidly through the air or through some obstacle … or a movement accompanied by such sound.” According to one account, when Goodrich salesmen complained at a sales conference about the fanciful nature of the brand name “Mystik,” the company president, Bertram G. Work, himself familiar with the sound made when he closed up the new galoshes, is reported to have replied, “What we need is an action word … something that will dramatize the way the thing zips.” And then he quickly added, “Why not call it the zipper?” And so in 1923 Zippers were first advertised as being “made only by Goodrich,” which registered the word as a trademark for the Zipper Boot. But usage respects no company’s rights, and eventually “zipper” came to be the common generic name for the device that is more properly called a “slide fastener.”

  That winter, Goodrich sold almost half a million Zippers, and throughout the mid-1920s it agreed to buy a minimum of a million fasteners per year from Hookless. The name “hookless fastener” seemed archaic beside “zipper,” and, showing no sentiment for the fact that it was attention to faults that had brought success, the Hookless Company now felt that its name had a “negative implication.” Since “zipper” was Goodrich’s, a new trademark was sought, one that emphasized “positive qualities.” After rejecting the likes of “Utilok” and “Bobolink,” Hookless selected “Talon” as the name for its slide fastener: “Everything about it seemed right. The elements of the fastener were surely like the claws of the eagle, gripping with firmness.” In 1937 the trademark would be adopted for the company name.

  By 1930 twenty million Talons per year were being sold for everything from pencil cases to motorboat engine covers, but remained virtually unused in women’s dresses or men’s trousers. The apparel industry would remain conservative until the mid- to late 1930s. Elsa Schiaparelli was among the first clothing designers to use the slide fastener in a big way, and her 1935 spring collection was described by The New Yorker as “dripping with zippers.” Soon after, an aggressive and successful advertising campaign promoted zippers through humor, including that of James Thurber, and inciting fear—of the embarrassment of “gap-osis” caused by skin and undergarments showing between snaps and buttons. The widespread adoption of zippers into clothing assured the future of Talon, Inc., as well as that of the growing competition.

  The B. F. Goodrich Company introduced the Mystik Boot “with the patented Hookless Fastener” for the winter-1923 season, but salesmen did not care for the name Mystik. Goodrich’s president agreed that what was needed was “an action word [to] dramatize the way the thing zips” and came up with “zipper.” The word was registered as a trademark by the rubber company for its “Zipper Boot” but soon came to be used as the common name for the slide fastener itself. (photo credit 6.6)

  If form follows function, then it follows a very circuitous and costly route, as the development of the slide fastener illustrates. The function of today’s zipper was as evident to Elias Howe in the mid-nineteenth century as it was to the host of later inventors who were also seeking a workable “automatic continuous clothing closure.” But the form to realize that function was far from self-evident, as shown by Judson’s clasp locker, Sundback’s hookless fastener and scoop-toothed slide fastener, and, most recently, zippers that in place of metal teeth have plastic spirals and shapes that hardly resemble clasps, hooks, or scoops. And there is no telling what today’s zippers might look like if one of the many men and women who patented the beginnings of another form of zipper had lain awake as many nights as Sundback did—thinking about how the operating problems with their cursed thing could be removed by a further improvement—or if they had had the benefit of an angel with the financial stamina of Colonel Walker. But, with or without such benefits, like the form of many a now familiar artifact, that of what has come to be known as the zipper certainly did not follow directly from function. The form clearly followed from the correction of failure after failure.

  7

  Tools Make Tools

  Few classes of artifacts exhibit as much diversity and specialization of form as the tools of the crafts and trades. Perhaps this should come as little surprise, for tools are generally acknowledged to be the first artifacts of civilization, and hence they have had the longest time to evolve. Furthermore, because of their very nature, as the artifacts with which are fashioned all other artifacts, tools have a special place in the world of things made.

  Through the ages, the professional users of tools by and large have not needed to, been able to, or wanted to talk to outsiders about their implements. They did not need to because tools themselves are used to make other tools, and thus users could very often fashion a new tool with their old ones. If they did need to communicate the design for a new tool to someone outside their trade, such as a blacksmith, they could do so without having to reveal the tool’s intended use. Moreover, users in the past we
re often illiterate and hence ill prepared to describe where and how ideas for new tools originated. Besides, the inventive process of conceiving a new tool was often a nonverbal one. Finally, craftsmen were unwilling to share information about their specialized tools because to do so would have been to give up their competitive edge and their value to those outside the craft.

  A telling anecdote about the craftsman’s mind and the evolution of tools of the trade has been related by George Sturt in his memoir of the nineteenth-century English farmer and potter William Smith. Although the objects that craftsmen sit on while working might not commonly be thought of as tools, their design can affect the efficiency and smoothness of working as surely as do knives and hammers. Sturt found it “odd” that some of Smith’s potting furniture had been given names, and so his attention was drawn to them in the course of describing the use of some stools:

  One stool was called “Broad-ass.” Sometimes the potter himself, not finding this stool in his workshop, would sing out, “Bring me Broad-ass.” Another stool went by the name of “Old Cockety.” But perhaps the most useful of the three, and not the least quaintly named, was a one-legged stool known as “Nobody.”