Anna Hartz
The Wild Backstory of Velcro
Some of the world’s most useful inventions come from nature. And sometimes, they appear during the most ordinary moments.
That’s exactly what happened to a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral, writes Historienet.
Grabbed onto the Dog’s Fur
In 1941, George went on a hunting trip in the Alps. When he returned home, he noticed something strange.
His socks and his dog’s fur were full of small burrs. They were stuck on tight and hard to remove.
George got curious. He took a closer look at the burrs using a microscope. What he saw surprised him.
The burrs had tiny hooks that grabbed onto loops in the fabric and in his dog’s fur. That’s how they stayed in place.
This simple discovery gave George an idea. He thought, what if he could create a material that worked the same way? Hooks on one side.
Loops on the other. He spent years working on it. Finally, he created what we now call Velcro. The name comes from two French words: “velours” meaning velvet and “crochet” meaning hook.
A Million-Dollar Idea
In the late 1950s, George started a company to produce his new invention. It didn’t take long before the product became a big success.
His company was soon selling about 55,000 kilometers of Velcro every year. That’s enough to wrap around the Earth—more than once.
Today, Velcro is used in clothing, shoes, bags, medical devices, space gear, and more.
Even though “Velcro” is a brand name, people often use it to describe all hook-and-loop fasteners. The name stuck, just like the burrs that inspired it.
George de Mestral’s simple walk in the mountains turned into a million-dollar idea. All because he paid attention to something most of us would just brush off.
