Otto Fredrik Gideon Sundbäck was born in Sweden to a prosperous farmer. After studying in Sweden, he moved to Germany to study at the polytechnic school in Bingen am Rhein, and graduated with an engineering degree in 1903. In 1905, Sundbäck emigrated to the United States.
Sundbäck’s separable fastener was the culmination of a design process that originated sixty years before his invention. In 1851, Elias Howe received a patent for an “Improvement in Fastenings for Garments,” but Howe did not seriously try to market the invention. Howe’s invention was akin to an elaborate drawstring.
Over forty years later, in 1893, Whitcomb L. Judson developed a new shoelace alternative to replace the standard boot laces for men and women, in order to help a friend with a sore back who couldn’t bend over to tie his shoes. Judson’s slide-fastening clasp locker could be opened and closed with one hand. Judson was a prolific inventor who had already obtained twelve patents for mechanical devices such as motor system improvements and railway brake innovations. With the support of businessman Colonel Lewis Walker, Judson launched the Universal Fastener Company to manufacture the clasp locker. The clasp locker had its public debut at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and met with little success.
The Universal Fastener Company moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1901, reorganized as the Fastener Manufacturing and Machine Company. Sundbäck was hired to work for the company in 1906. The company moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania, and operated for most of the twentieth century under the name Talon, Inc. Sundbäck worked on improving the clasp locker, and registered a patent in Germany in 1909. The United States rights to the invention were in the name of the Meadville company (operating as the Hookless Fastener Co.), but Sundbäck retained non-U.S. rights, and used the rights to set up Lightning Fastener Co. in Ontario, Canada.
Sundbäck redesigned the Judson fastener to create a more durable design, and the separable fastener went on sale in 1913. Sundbäck next increased the number of fastening elements from four per inch to ten or eleven, introduced two facing rows of teeth that pulled into a single piece by the slider, and increased the opening for the teeth guided by the slider. The patent for the “Separable Fastener” was issued in 1917.
Sundbäck also developed the manufacturing machine for the separable fastener, which took a special Y-shaped wire and cut scoops from it, then punched the scoop dimple and nib, and clamped each scoop on a cloth tape to produce a continuous zipper chain. Within a year of beginning operations, Sundbäck’s machinery produced several hundred feet of fastener per day.
In 1923, during a trip to Europe, Sundbäck sold his European rights to Martin Othmar Winterhalter, who improved the design by using ribs and grooves instead of Sundbäck’s joints and jaws, and began producing the improvement with his company Riri in Germany and then Switzerland.
The popular term “zipper,” which came from the sound made by the separable fasteners, came from the B.F. Goodrich Company in 1923. The company used Sundbäck’s fastener on a new type of rubber boot, referring to the fastener as a “zipper,” and the name stuck. The early primary uses of the zipper were for closing boots and tobacco pouches. Zippers began appearing in clothing in 1925, such as leather jackets made by Schott NYC.
In the 1930s, a sales campaign began for children’s clothing featuring zippers, praising the fasteners for promoting self-reliance in young children by making it possible for children to dress themselves.
The zipper beat the button in 1937 in the “Battle of the Fly,” after French fashion designers raved over zippers in men’s trousers. Esquire declared the zipper the “Newest Tailoring Idea for Men,” and that among the zippered fly’s many virtues was that it would exclude “The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray.” (At least until There’s Something About Mary.)
More recently, zipper models that could open on both ends, such as on jackets, have been developed.
The zipper has become the most widespread fastener in today’s world.
Though Sundbäck died in 1954 at the age of 1954, he was posthumously honored by inclusion in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006 for his work on the development of the zipper.