2/29/2024 0 Comments Cost of velcro tapeA 1959 fashion show at New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel displayed everything from Velcro diapers to Velcro golf jackets to stylish society matrons a New York Times report declared it "the end of buttons, toggles, hooks, zippers, snaps and even safety pins." But even with colors the stuff was too ugly, and for a long time it was relegated to athletic equipment. Originally available only in black, the tape's aesthetic appeal expanded when the company began offering it in multiple colors. It showed up in cars (underneath floor mats) home decor (as fasteners for slipcovers and drapes), even on airplanes (seat cushions used as flotation devices). Hospitals affixed Velcro to everything from blood pressure gauges (it's on the band that nurses strap to your arm) to patient gowns. Velcro got a huge image boost from NASA in the early 1960s when Apollo astronauts used it to secure pens, food packets and equipment they didn't want floating away. (It's an example of metonymy, a rhetorical figure of speech in which a brand name is used to refer to an entire category of product. No one says "hook-and-loop fastener," just as no one says "re-sealable zipper storage bag" instead of Ziploc. "It is not the generic name of stuff that fastens shoes, clothing, and hundreds of other things." Except, of course, that it is. "Not all hook and loop fasteners are genuine Velcro brand products!" Velcro's company website exclaims. It's important to note namely, because we're legally required to do so that Velcro is the name of a company, not a general term for the scratchy fastening system we all know and love. (Watch TIME's video about the 50 best inventions of 2009) It seems there just weren't that many removable, re-useable all-surface fasteners back then. Early news reports (such as one that appeared in TIME in 1958) described the product as a zipperless zipper which, while accurate, sounds a little strange to us now. Though the first Velcro was made out of cotton, de Mestral soon discovered that nylon worked best because it didn't wear with use. He named his invention Velcro, a combination of the words "velvet" and "crochet," and formally patented it in 1955. After nearly eight years of research (apparently it's not so easy to make a synthetic burr), de Mestral successfully reproduced the natural attachment with two strips of fabric, one with thousands of tiny hooks and another with thousands of tiny loops. Velcro is the brainchild of Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer who, in 1941 went for a walk in the woods and wondered if the burrs that clung to his trousers and dog could be turned into something useful. "Taliban attacks come and go," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in a June 15 USA Today story, "but dust is constant in Afghanistan." The so-called "hook-and-loop" fastener was added to standard issue uniforms in 2004, but a plethora of complaints from dissatisfied soldiers led to a year-long investigation, which in turn led to an official decision to remove Velcro from military uniforms starting this August. And its little loops get clogged with dust from the Afghan and Iraqi deserts.
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