According to our progeny who claim to know of such things, it seems I cannot live without four items: fishing line, clothes line rope, duct tape and Velcro. There are a few others but those are the principals. They insist that if those four already-in-use items were to be pulled from our house, it’d crash to the dirt like a house of cards. Could be. I am pretty good at jerry-rigging things around here with those items, and guess what? They’ve managed to stay rigged for multiple decades.

But it got me to thinking, always a dangerous thing, about the origin of one of my staples; Velcro. I have yards of the stuff, sew-on and stick-on, black, white and beige. I wondered about it, so took a trip down Google lane and learned some interesting stuff. Wanna know? Yes? No? I’ll go with yes.

Seems that way back in 1941 when I was a beautiful, precocious, curly haired toddler of 3, a Swiss engineer guy named George de Mestral was doing some bird hunting in the ancient Jura Mountains in Switzerland. He had his trusty Irish pointer dog with him whose name, alas, has been lost to the ages, but the hunting wasn’t going too awfully well because, lucky for the birds, de Mestral had to spend all of his shooting time pulling off dozens and dozens of annoying and very sticky cockleburs off his woolen clothing and his dog. The hunter was astonished at the tenacity of those things and how tightly they stuck. (You know where we’re going with this, right?)

Being the engineer he was, he took a few of those awful burrs home and put them under the microscope he happened to keep around, and was “stunned” to see that the exteriors of those seed pods were covered with masses of tiny hooks. Eureka! Engineer de Mestral, not one to let a good entrepreneurial idea go AWOL, saw fabric fasteners in his future, along with dollars. Or actually Swiss francs. And there you have it. Velcro was born!

But big industries are not built in a day and it took de Mestral another eight years of study and work and planning and persuasion to get the world to understand that we can actually live without zippers and buttons, snappers, clasps and laces, and hooks and eyes, although does anyone use hooks and eyes anymore? Or even know what they are? I have a card of them purchased in the 1940s, stashed in my button collection drawer.

So convinced was Engineer de Mestral that he’d hit fastener pay dirt that he finally quit his job in 1952, got a Swiss banker to lend him $150,000 and with that lucre he perfected the Velcro concept he’d had the smarts to patent in 1951. He used very strong nylon strips but had a problem getting those miniscule hooks cut so they could hook into the opposing fastening fabric strip.

He was 44 and facing financial ruin because he could not invent a machine that would cut those hooks into the nylon strips, but as life so often happens to wannabe inventors, he chanced to see a barber cut and slide with his scissors on a customer’s hair and viola, he figured out the hook-and-loop issue. Don’t write in and ask me how that happened. It just did. He was back in the Velcro biz.

Oh, you’re wondering aren’t you, how he came up with the name, right? Got it covered. It was made from two French words (you already figured that George de Mestral was French, right?)— “velour” (the French word for velvet) was the Vel part, and the second syllable was taken from the first syllable of the French word “crochet,” or to hook. Voila! Velcro. Bon!

Finally M. de Mestral got his Velcro invention all working well. He envisioned so many uses for it, amongst them and perhaps most importantly helping seniors and others with arthritis or illness issues to get into and out of clothing and shoes with ease, and he even thought about little kids with uncoordinated fingers getting dressed more easily. One thing I’ve noticed however is that today’s young ‘uns don’t know how to tie shoes at the early age we learned, pre Velcro. But that’s a very small thing in the Great Scheme, right?

After Velcro’s official debut in the 1960s, while upscale clothing manufacturers weren’t too interested (it was a bulky product after all and never did or does lie completely flat) the aerospace industry took an interest. Mylar suits used the product, and astronauts were able to “stand” upright while in space when their boots would Velcro to a surface. And now all industries use the product. Velcro is now everywhere and we cannot imagine life without it, right? One problem is that it’s a little loud when opening, creating certain difficulties when one is trying to sneak in or out of certain situations, if you get my drift. The Velcro folks should really attempt to fix that problem.

Back in 1984, late night talk show host David Letterman brought knowledge of the Velcro product into everyone’s living room when on his show, (he still had the charming Alfred E. Newman gap between his front teeth) he dressed in an all-Velcro suit, jumped from a small trampoline and heaved himself onto a Velcro covered wall — and stuck there. Now everyone everywhere knew the product worked, could support many pounds, and uses for the product and sales, as they say, soared.  Since M. de Mestral died six years later, he obviously saw that TV performance, and I’ll wager he was tres heureux. I’m still uncertain how Letterman got back down off the wall. I guess it was a show-biz thing.

So now you know. Are you still with me? One more thing — a little Velcro trivia; people employed by the Velcro company are forbidden to ever use the word “Velcro” when talking about, well, Velcro. They are only allowed to call the product “hook and loop fastener” or “hook tape” or “loop tape.” The reason? They do not want it to become a generic term like Xerox or Kleenex or Band-Aid or Hershey’s or Scotch tape, and all those familiar and heavily used labels. Seriously? Oh come on guys, get a grip!

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.