In one way or another, you probably use this product every day, and may not have know that you can thank a dog for it. Sort of.
In 1941, George de Mestral went hunting with his dog. It probably wasn’t the first time he had to pick burrs off the dog and his own clothes, but this time, he got curious. An engineer, de Mestral examined the burrs under a microscope and realized that they were covered in hundreds and hundreds of tiny little hooks, and it was these hooks that kept getting caught in the loops of fabric in his clothes and in the hair of his dog.
George had an idea, but it took him ten years to duplicate a synthetic version of those burrs. Generically, his invention was ‘hook and loop’ tape, but we know it by the name under which he patented it in 1955: Velcro. George had combined two French words, velours (French for ‘velvet’) and crochet (French for hook) to come up with the name.
George’s product hit the shelves throughout Europe by the late ’50s but Velcro wasn’t popularized until the ’70s when NASA used it for space suits and to secure food pouches.
George was selling over sixty million yards of the stuff every year when he sold the company and worldwide patent rights to a Swiss company. According to his wife, he lived on royalties and profits from his Swiss factory for the remaining 30 years of his life.
As for the dog, some have suspected that it was a Spaniel or Pointer. Based on the photograph, what say you?
Image found on Pinterest and happily credited upon receipt of information