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What natural object inspired Velcro?
Swiss engineer George de Mestral saw burrs stuck to his dog's fur in the 1940s and copied the tiny hooks.
The story usually begins in 1941, when de Mestral returned from a walk in the Swiss Alps with his dog and found burrs stuck to his clothes and the animal's coat. Curious, he examined a burr under a microscope and saw many tiny hooks at the end of its bristles that caught on loops of fabric and fur. He realized that a fastener could be created with one surface of hooks and another of loops.
Turning the observation into a product took years. De Mestral worked with weavers in France and Switzerland, and the early tests with cotton failed because the material wore down. He eventually found that nylon, treated under infrared light, formed durable hooks when loops were cut. He patented the design in 1955 and named it Velcro, a blend of the French words velours (velvet) and crochet (hook).
Velcro is a standard example of biomimicry, design that copies nature. Its use grew after NASA used it on spacecraft and spacesuits in the 1960s to hold objects in zero gravity, which helped publicize it, although NASA did not invent it. The plant most often cited is burdock, whose burrs are the likely candidates in the story, although the species de Mestral actually examined is not recorded in every telling.