The Zipper

For seventy years, the zipper was a failure. Patented and forgotten in 1851, unveiled to an indifferent public in 1893, it jammed, sprang open, and embarrassed nearly everyone who dared to sew it into a garment. Then a Swedish engineer counted the teeth and quietly changed how the modern world holds itself together.

The Zipper traces the improbable, century-long journey of an object so ordinary we no longer see it: from a sewing-machine tycoon who let the idea slip away, to the restless salesman who invented too many things, to the wartime money belts and flight suits that finally proved it worked, to the quiet Japanese firm that now turns out billions of them every year.

Inside you will discover:

• Why the man who patented the first garment fastener never bothered to build it
• How the word 'zipper' was born from a pair of rubber boots
• The 1937 'Battle of the Fly' that ended the button's reign in menswear
• How a single company came to smelt its own brass to control every tooth it makes

Meticulously researched and told with wit, this is popular history at its most surprising: a small device, and the large story of how everyday things become invisible.