London: The 132nd birthday of Gideon Sundback, the Swedish-American electrical engineer, is being celebrated worldwide through Google’s latest doodle, a giant zipper running down the centre of the search engine’s homepage.
Gideon Sundback was most commonly associated with the development of the fastening device that revolutionised the clothing industry.
Sundback’s design, that he finalised in 1913, had a zipper with interlocking oval scoops (earlier designs made use of hooks) that could be easily interlocked by moving a slider. The patent application for the new invention was filed in 1914 and issued in 1917.
At the time of its invention the zipper wasn’t called a zipper and instead referred to as a ‘separable fastener’. The word zipper was later made popular by the BF Goodrich Company, that used Sundback’s ‘separable fastener’ for its products.
The zipper regularly finds a place in lists of inventions that shaped the world.
The name zipper was created in 1923 by B.F. Goodrich, who used the device on their new boots. Initially, boots and tobacco pouches were the primary use for zippers; it took another twenty years before they caught on in the fashion industry. About the time of World War II the zipper achieved wide acceptance for the flies of trousers and the plackets of skirts and dresses.
Sundback died of a heart condition in 1954 and was interred at Greendale cemetery in Meadville, Pennsylvania.
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