In 1948 a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral came back from a walk in the Alps with his dog. Both of them were covered in prickly little burrs from a plant called burdock. While picking them out, de Mestral got curious. He stuck a burr under a microscope and saw thousands of tiny hooks. Each one had caught onto a small loop in the dog’s fur.
He spent the next 10 years trying to copy the trick in fabric. Eventually he had a working tape with stiff plastic hooks on one side and soft loops on the other. He named it Velcro, mashing up the French words “velours” (velvet) and “crochet” (hook).
At first nobody wanted it. Then NASA used Velcro in the Apollo space program to stop tools floating away in zero gravity. Suddenly it was cool. Today Velcro is on shoes, jackets, blood pressure cuffs and the inside of every space station, holding things down whether or not there’s gravity.
