Velcro
Next time the rrrriippp sound of a Velcro fastener gets on your nerves, take it up with your dog.
Back in the early 1940s, Swiss inventor George de Mestral decided to take his loyal dog for a walk. Mestral’s dog, as dogs are wont to do, led his master through some brambles and brush. Upon returning home, Mestral discovered that both the dog and his trousers were covered with prickly burrs.
A lesser man might simply have thrown his trousers in the corner and shaved the dog, but Mestral was a Swiss inventor, and took his responsibility to science seriously. Studying the burrs under his microscope, Mestral discovered that the secret of a burr’s dogged stickiness lay in the tiny hook at the tip of each of its little spines that grabbed and held tight to the loops of thread in Mestral’s trousers.
Mimicking nature, Mestral then designed a reusable fastening system with two sides: one with tiny hooks like the burr, the other with plenty of fabric loops like his trousers. The resulting product was dubbed “Velcro,” combining the French velours (velvet) with croche (hooked).
Manufacturing Velcro turned out to be a tricky business, and it took quite a while to get the technology of making those tiny hooks just right, but today Velcro, manufactured by Velcro Industries B.V., is used in thousands of products, including, of course, dog coats.
Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble, although it has been blamed by some for driving independent book sellers from the field, is actually the progeny of two very dedicated bibliophiles.
Way back in 1873, Charles M. Barnes started a book selling business out of his home in Wheaton, Illinois. Barnes apparently passed his love of books to his son, who in 1917 traveled to New York City, where he met G. Clifford Noble. Together they opened a small bookstore in the city, and a few years later expanded into what would become their flagship store at Fifth Avenue and 18th Street.
Barnes & Noble chugged happily along for the next few decades, but fell on hard times in the late 1960s, the beginning of a period that saw the extinction of dozens of independent bookstores in New York City. Fortunately, Barnes & Noble caught the eye of Leonard Reggio, a successful college bookstore owner, who bought the chain in 1971 and set out on a course of expansion that eventually would spawn more than 600 Barnes & Noble stores and a successful online presence, as well as almost 200 B. Dalton and Doubleday bookshops.
Adidas
Adi Dassler pretty much invented the modern sports shoe. As a 20 year-old track enthusiast in Germany, Dassler made his first shoe, a canvas training shoe for runners, in 1920. Over the next two decades, Dassler expanded his line, and by 1937 was producing 30 models of shoes for eleven different sports. Early on, Dassler made a point of soliciting the opinions of the athletes themselves and being personally present at the sporting events in which competitors wore his shoes.
After the interruption of World War II, Dassler restarted his company and decided to register the trademark “Adidas,” a melding of the first syllables of his own first and last names. In 1949, he registered the company’s famous three-stripes design as a trademark. By the 1960s, Adidas dominated the professional sports shoe market and began manufacturing athletic equipment and Adidas logo clothing as well.