Everyone starts with a curiosity; The annoying birth of Velcro.

in Popular STEM6 days ago

Everyone starts with a curiosity; The annoying birth of Velcro.




There is a million-dollar invention that was only possible because a dog was filled with dirt. In 1941, a Swiss engineer named Georges de Mestral went for a walk in the countryside with his dog. Everything was going great until when he got home he realized that the animal was covered in little balls of Alpine thistle that had gotten stuck in his hair. He tried to shake them off, but they didn't come off easily, by any means, so he had to remove them one by one. a.


Imagine how funny he must have been, but then he thought, how the hell do they hold on so damn well? He grabbed a magnifying glass and began to investigate, thistle seeds had small natural hooks that clung to any fiber, a mechanism that was as annoying as it was absolutely brilliant, he liked it so much that he spent years trying to replicate it.


He tested all types of threads, fabrics and synthetic fibers, until he finally found a system of hooks and loops that worked, he called it Velcro, a mixture of velug meaning third hair in French and crochet meaning hook, the funny thing is that for more than a decade no one took it seriously, but when the space race arrived, NASA adopted it because it was very useful for holding things in zero gravity.


It also allowed astronauts to quickly put on and take off their suits. When the Apollo XII mission reached the moon in 1969, almost all of the spacecraft's components were fastened with Velcro, and then the world finally realized that those tiny hooks could do anything, and everyone wanted a piece of the sticky invention.


Today, the Velcro company earns $1.8 billion a year. Isn't it funny to think that it all started with a dirty little dog and an innocent walk in the woods?





The images without reference were created with AI
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