User:Somesh shandilya/sandbox

Zip fastener
Whitcomb L. Judson, Chicago engineer, devised two metal chains, which joined together as a slide passed over them, to take the place of the rows of buttons on high boots in 1893. There were two faults in this invention which the public didn’t like, however. Not only did the device catch on things as people walked past, but it came open too easily without warning.

A Swedish engineer, Gideon sandbank, working in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA, in 1913, came up with a simple but brilliant solution to the pro1blem of Judson’s slide fastener. He made his units in pairs, on two parallel tapes on cloth. Each tooth on the zip was really a hook which hooked into an eye under the hook on the same place on the opposite tape.

The slide pressed out the teeth as it ran over them and left them hooked together. This is still how a zip fastener works. When America entered the First World War in 1917, the American armed forces ordered the new invention to be fitted on to uniforms, flying clothes, and so on. In Britain, Manufacture began in 1919under the name of the ready fastener, by the firm of Kynoch, of Birmingham. Its real success came, though, when it was demonstrated at the empire exhibition at Webley in 1924.

At that exhibition a fastener was zipped and unzipped three million times without breaking down. How it got its modern name happened in 1926, when the writer gilbert franked fiddled with one and said zip!it’s open. Zip! It’s closed. Ever since then it’s been known as the zip-fastener.

The first women’s clothes to have zips were designed by Madame Schiaparelli, a famous Parisian clothes designer, in 1930.

Until then zips were regarded as improper for women to use on their dresses. That was perhaps a little odd, because the first zips on men’s trousers were not introduced until1935.