Zipper de doo dah

Guess what, chaps? Today is the 96th anniversary of the zipper. For about twenty years around the turn of the twentieth century, a Swedish design engineer working in New Jersey was trying to perfect a fastening method that worked faster and more reliably than buttons and hooks and laces and all the other ways that people tried to keep their clothes together at the time.

His name was Gideon Sundback, and he fixed two rows of teeth on opposing cloth tapes, which interlocked by the mechanism of a central device that slid over them. In short, he designed a zipper. Of course, the word wasn't in use at the time--and wasn't until 1921, when B.F. Goodrich ordered up 170,000 of the things from Sundback's Hookless Fastener Company for its new line of rubber galoshes. Goodrich coined the trade name Zipper, either to indicate the speed with which you could get in and out of the boots, or to imitate the sound the fastener made when you, well, zipped it up.

The whole thing was a bit of a novelty, but over the next ten years, they were regarded as a trendy thing, and not necessarily in a good way. (In his dystopic science-fiction novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley held them up as an exemplar of what the brave new world was about. And it wasn't a world he held in great favor.) But eventually, they insinuated their way into the garment world, and they've been there, front and center, ever since.

But aside from the front of a few retro garments, these fasteners now maintain the modesty of trouser-wearers across the planet. And for that, Mr. Sundback, we offer you our thanks. After slyly checking that we're not at half-mast, that is.