Nature’s Velcro
By Nichole Schill, Naturalist
Have you ever come in from a hike and discovered a few of these attached to your socks and shoelaces? That’s what happened to Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral, who used nature’s technology to create an invention many of us use every day. These seeds or “burrs” from the burdock plant (Arctium sp.) were the inspiration for the hook-and-loop fastener we call Velcro — although Velcro is technically a brand name, not the fastener itself.
Here’s the origin story from the Velcro company website:
“In 1941, de Mestral was on a hunting trip and noticed that both his pants and his Irish Pointer’s hair were covered in the burs from a burdock plant. Where many might have brushed them off in irritation, de Mestral decided to study the burs under a microscope, more out of curiosity than sensing a new business opportunity. … What de Mestral saw were thousands of tiny hooks that efficiently bound themselves to nearly any fabric (or dog hair) that passed by. De Mestral realized that if he could create a synthetic form of this fabric, it would allow for a new way to fasten things, a middle ground between buttons, zippers, and simply sewing stuff together. His idea was to take the hooks he had seen in the burs and combine them with simple loops of fabric. The tiny hooks would catch in the loops, and things would just, well, come together.”
It was regarded as little more than a curiosity until NASA used hook-and-loop fasteners to keep things from floating around spaceships in zero gravity.
“Suddenly, de Mestral’s invention wasn’t an oddity — it was space age. It was, well, cool. It began to show up in clothing in the mid-’60s, including high fashion — French fashion legend Pierre Cardin became obsessed with the stuff,” says the Velcro website. “And de Mestral’s invention was officially a hit.”
