Product Description

The zip-fastener was invented by Whitcomb Judson, a frustrated man with a penchant for complexity. It didn't work and wasn't wanted. This book tells the fascinating story of how a useless technological novelty worked its way into daily life and took its place as one of the defining artefacts of the 20th century. The cast of characters might well have come from a novel: the brilliant engineer who took 20 years to make the zip-fastener work; the small-town lawyer whose blind faith in Judson's invention sustained him for 40 lean years; the flamboyant Paris designer who made zip-fasteners the height of fashion; and the Japanese entrepreneur whose dedication to simple ideas made him the "Zipper King" of the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2023489 in Books
• Published on: 1994-05-13
• Released on: 1994-05-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
How the ingenious zipper, a newfangled, unwanted novelty, became a ubiquitous part of daily life is the story told in this engaging chronicle peopled by a colorful cast of characters. The zipper can be traced to oddball Chicago inventor Whitcomb Judson, whose awkward shoe fastener, patented in 1893, never quite caught on. Col. Lewis Walker, a suave Pennsylvania lawyer and investor, made the hookless fastener his mission, enlisting the help of Otto Gideon Sundbach, a Swedish immigrant engineer who improved on Judson's invention with a 1917 patent that revolutionized the modern zipper. Friedel, a historian of technology at the University of Maryland, ably explores the advent of the zipper as adornment on trousers and purses in America's flapper decade, as a badge of modernity in Hitler's mechanized Third Reich and as a sexual, social and political symbol appropriated by Aldous Huxley, Marlon Brando, the anti-Nazi satirist Kurt Tucholsky, the Rolling Stones and Erica Jong. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Today the zipper seems a commonplace if not insignificant piece of our lives. Behind this tiny piece of technology, however, lies a story rich in manufacturing, economics, fashion, engineering, and , most importantly , personalities. Friedel, a historian of technology, examines all these topics in this tale of the "hookless fastener" (a.k.a., the zipper) from its 1890s origin through the 40 years of refinement and eventual acceptance in the 1930s and up to the present day. Enjoyable and readable, Friedel's saga of the zipper provides him with the perfect means to peer inside technology's origin, revealing its capacity to fill needs and showing how novelty pushes us to the future. Recommended for all collections.
- Michael D. Cramer, Virginia Polytechnic & State Univ. Libs., Blacksburg
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
A peer of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, Whitcomb Judson was an inventor with numerous patents, yet this man who created the zipper died relatively unknown. He backed the wrong horse, so to speak--putting his efforts into pneumatic (rather than electric) streetcars and shoe fasteners. Friedel pursues the erratic path of the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Co. from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the next, when the company became Talon, Inc., manufacturer of zippers. Friedel's history traces fashion fluctuations, patent wars, and marketing struggles as well as the personalities of the individuals enmeshed in the fastener/zipper evolution. An interesting sidebar in the history of inventions. Denise Perry Donavin