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The history of Velcro
The next time you are in a store, see how many different products you can find that uses Velcro You may find bags games jackets shoes and many other items. Velcro has even made it to outer space NASA uses Velcro inside its spaceships astronauts use it to stick things to the wall to keep them from floating away As you can see Velcro has many uses but where did Velcro come from
When you think of Velcro you probably don’t think of mother nature. So it may surprise you learn that mother nature was the reason for this invention
In 1948 a swiss engineer george de mestral went for a hike in the woods with his dog When he returned he noticed that burrs-those prickly see casings from plants -were stuck all over his shirt and pants He tried to remove the burrs and had a hard time pulling them off They stuck amazingly well to his clothes.
Mestral decided to look more closely at the burrs on his clothing by using a microscope He saw they were carved with little hooks that had curved through the tiny loops in the fabric of his trousers mestral though there might be many uses for such wonderfully sticky material
Mestral worked on making the loops from different fabrics and crafted tiny hooks out of plastic it was not easy to imitate mother nature’s burrs In fact it took eight years of hard work
Mestral finally perfected his invention: a strip of looped fabric When the two strips were pressed together they stuck Mestral called his invention Velcro he combined the first letters velour a smooth type of cloth and crochet a craft using hooks and loops
In the beginning velcro saw used in plac of zippers But people quickly saw a variety of uses for mestral’s invention Now Velcro is used in all cinds of creative ways- from sneakers to spaceships
