A Swiss engineer copied burrs from his dog's fur — and NASA took it to the moon

In 1941, Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral returned from a hunting trip in the Alps with burrs stuck to his dog's fur and his own clothes. Curious, he examined a burr under a microscope and discovered hundreds of tiny hooks that caught on anything with loops — fabric, fur, hair. He realised he could duplicate this mechanism to create a reversible fastener.

De Mestral spent the next ten years perfecting the manufacturing process. He tried cotton first, but it frayed. He switched to nylon, recently invented, and discovered that sewing it under hot infrared light formed small hooks. The first loom that could weave the hooks took eight years to build; another year to create the one that trimmed the loops. He named his invention Velcro, from the French 'velours' (velvet) and 'crochet' (hook).

When de Mestral took Velcro to Lyon, then the centre of the weaving industry, it was rejected. The fashion industry saw it as 'leftover bits of cheap fabric' — impractical and utilitarian. No major clothing maker adopted it. Velcro was nearly a complete commercial failure.

Velcro's first major break came from an unlikely customer: NASA. The Apollo program needed a fastener that astronauts could operate in bulky space suits. Velcro was used on suits, sample collection bags, and lunar vehicles during all Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972. After Apollo, skiers, scuba divers, and children's clothing makers followed. By 1978, when de Mestral's patent expired, Velcro had hundreds of imitators worldwide.