George de Mestral

George de Mestral (June 19, 1907 – February 8, 1990) was a Swiss electrical engineer who invented the hook and loop fastener.

He was born to Albert de Mestral, a civil engineer, and Marthe de Goumoëns in Colombier, near Lausanne, Switzerland. De Mestral designed a toy airplane at age twelve and patented it. He attended the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. After graduation in 1930, he worked in the machine shop of an engineering company. He worked on inventing hook and loop fasteners for ten years starting in 1948. In 1955 he successfully patented hook and loop, eventually selling 60 million yards (about 55,000 km) a year through a multimillion-dollar company.

Georges was married three times: to Jeanne Schnyder in 1932, Monique Panchaud de Bottens in 1949, and Helen Mary Dale. On his father's death in 1966, de Mestral inherited the family home at Colombier, château Saint-Saphorin-sur-Morges.

De Mestral died in Commugny, Switzerland, where he is buried. The municipality posthumously named an avenue, L'avenue Georges de Mestral, in his honor. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1999 for inventing hook and loop fasteners.

De Mestral first conceptualized hook and loop after returning from a hunting trip with his dog in the Alps in 1941. After removing several of the burdock burrs (seeds) that kept sticking to his clothes and his dog's fur, he became curious as to how it worked. He examined them under a microscope, and noted hundreds of "hooks" that caught on anything with a loop, such as clothing, animal fur, or hair. He saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in a simple fashion, if he could figure out how to duplicate the hooks and loops.

Originally people refused to take him, and the idea, seriously. He took his idea to Lyon, which was then a center of weaving, where he did manage to gain the help of one weaver, who made two cotton strips that worked. However, the cotton wore out quickly, so de Mestral turned to synthetic fibers. He settled on nylon as being the best synthetic after, through trial and error, he eventually discovered that nylon forms hooks that were perfect for the hook side of the fastener when sewn under hot infrared light. Though he had figured out how to make the hooks, he had yet to figure out a way to mechanize the process, and to make the looped side. Next he found that nylon thread, when woven in loops and heat-treated, retains its shape and is resilient, however the loops had to be cut in just the right spot so that they could be fastened and unfastened many times. On the verge of giving up, a new idea came to him. He bought a pair of shears and trimmed the tops off the loops, thus creating hooks that would match up perfectly with the loops.

...
Wikipedia