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The Zipper

Who really invented the zipper?

1851

Sliding clasps

In Elias Howe's patent, clasps slid along ribs at the garment's edge and gathered to close it when a cord was pulled. Howe never made it.

The zipper you open and close maybe ten times a day has no single inventor. The idea appeared in 1851, the sliding guide in 1893, today's teeth in 1913, and the name in 1923, from a rubber boot.

This hall follows that single pull across more than thirty years, from dusty patents to sailors' money belts and Paris runways.

The legend: the 1893 Chicago World's Fair

Many books say the zipper was unveiled at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, in front of millions of visitors.

What really happened

Researchers found no record of it in the fair's official catalogue. And the 'clasp locker' patented that year had no teeth, was never sewn into clothes and jammed often. The modern zipper came twenty years later.

The legend: the 1893 Chicago World's Fair

Watch the documentary

Timeline

1851

Howe's clasps

Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine, patented an 'Improvement in Fastenings for Garments': clasps sliding on ribs gathered together and closed the garment when a cord was pulled. Howe never marketed it.¹⁴

Massachusetts
1893

The clasp locker

To get rid of long boot laces, Whitcomb Judson built a device whose sliding guide hooked opposing clasps together. The patent was granted on 29 August 1893. The prototype worked but was clumsy and jammed often.²¹¹

Chicago
1904–1905

"A pull and it's done!"

Funded by lawyer Lewis Walker, the company launched a new model with a bold slogan. But the hooks tore fabric, sometimes sprang open on their own, and had to be removed before washing.¹³⁷

Hoboken
1906

The immigrant engineer

Born in Sweden and trained as an engineer in Germany, Gideon Sundback arrived in America in 1905, joined Judson's company in 1906 and soon became head designer.⁶¹⁸

Hoboken
1913

Hooks out, teeth in

Sundback dropped hooks entirely and used identical small metal teeth instead. Fastening elements per inch went from four to ten or eleven.¹⁰¹⁷

Meadville
1917

The 'Separable Fastener' patent

Filed in 1914, patent US 1,219,881 was granted in 1917. It is the basis of the zipper you use today.³

USA
1917–1918

Sailors without pockets

Tailor Robert Ewig sewed the toothed strips into money belts, because sailors' uniforms had no pockets. Nearly all of the year's roughly 24,000 sales were money belts. In 1918 the Navy ordered 10,000 for flying suits.¹³¹⁰

New York
1923

Zzzip!

B.F. Goodrich closed its new rubber galoshes with the fastener and called them 'Zipper' boots. 'Zip' was the sound of something moving fast. The world gave the name not to the boot but to the toothed strip on it.⁴²¹²²

Ohio
1935–1937

The runway and the battle of the fly

Elsa Schiaparelli did not hide the zipper; she put it on show in the colour of the fabric. In 1937 the zipper beat the button in the 'battle of the fly' on men's trousers.¹²¹⁴⁴

Paris
1934–1950

Three letters: YKK

Tadao Yoshida founded a small company in Tokyo in 1934 and brought in a zipper machine from America in 1950. Today YKK makes nearly half of the world's zippers.⁸²⁰

Tokyo

How does a zipper work?

Staggered teeth

On the edges of two fabric tapes, the teeth are not opposite each other but alternate, one from each side.
Bump and hollow

Each tooth has a small bump on one face and a small hollow on the other.
The Y-shaped slider

Pulled up, the slider brings the teeth together at a slight angle and each bump settles into its neighbour's hollow. Pulled down, a small wedge in the middle separates them one by one.

So who invented it?

Elias Howe: The idea of a garment closed by sliding clasps (1851)
Whitcomb Judson: The clasp locker with a sliding guide (1893)
Gideon Sundback: Hookless teeth, the 1917 patent and the machine to make them
B.F. Goodrich: The name 'zipper' (1923)

an idea only becomes an invention when someone makes it work every day, on every fabric, in every rain.

Did you know?

Early metal zippers rusted; they had to be unpicked before washing and sewn back on, and came with a small instruction booklet.
Judson also built a streetcar driven by compressed air; the test line lasted only a few weeks.
Sundback kept improving his zipper until his death in 1954. According to his son, he always had one thing on his mind: quality.

Today

Today

Look at the pull on your zipper: you will probably see those three letters. The three-part idea in Sundback's 1917 patent still works the same way in jackets, bags and tents.

Sources

Stories that cannot be verified are marked "as the story goes".