Who invented the zipper? Judson, Sundback and the 1917 patent that made it work

Who invented the zipper? The most accurate answer is two people and a company. Whitcomb Judson patented the first slide fastener for shoes in the 1890s, Gideon Sundback turned it into the interlocking design that works, and B. F. Goodrich gave it the name zipper in 1923. The patents are public, and reading them shows who did what.

Who invented the zipper: Judson first

Wikipedia's history of the zipper credits Whitcomb L. Judson, an American inventor from Chicago, with the original design from which the modern device evolved. His goal was a replacement for shoe laces and buttoned boots. His clasp locker, patented in the 1890s, worked as a more complicated hook and eye fastener that opened and closed with a slider. The article's list of U.S. patents includes 557,207, "Fastening for Shoes," and 557,208, "Clasp-Locker for Shoes," both dated March 31, 1896.

It worked on a prototype basis but jammed. Wikipedia says the early device had mechanical problems that caused jamming, and that Judson and his partner, Lewis Walker, put it into their own boots. Judson had a patentable idea and a fastener people did not trust.

Sundback makes it work

Gideon Sundbäck was a Swedish-American electrical engineer hired by the Judson-derived company in 1906. The company later moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania, and operated for most of the century as Talon, Inc.

Two of his patents show the progress. U.S. patent 1,060,378, "Separable Fastener," was issued on April 29, 1913. The application was filed on April 2, 1908 and the patent names him as living in Hoboken, New Jersey and assigns it to the Automatic Hook and Eye Company. It is still a chain of hooks and eyes carried on cloth strips, called stringers, that engage as a slider passes.

U.S. patent 1,219,881, also titled "Separable Fastener," was issued on March 20, 1917. Its header gives the application date as August 1914. By then Sundback lived in Meadville and assigned the patent to the Hookless Fastener Company, a Pennsylvania corporation. The company name matters: Hookless is the point, since the new fastener no longer relied on hooks at all.

The 1917 design replaced hooks with interlocking scoops that fit between each other, with a slider forcing them together. Wikipedia explains that the improvement introduced two facing rows of teeth pulled into a single piece by the slider, and that Sundbäck also made the machine that produced it, the "S-L" or "strapless" machine, which cut scoops from Y shaped wire and clamped each on cloth tape.

The patents also explain a common error. Wikipedia notes that Sundbäck retained non-U.S. rights and used them to set up the Lightning Fastener Company in St. Catharines, Ontario, which led to a common misperception that he was Canadian and that the zipper originated there.

The 1913 patent also shows the commercial setting. It was filed in 1908 and issued five years later, so the work behind the 1917 design spanned almost a decade of patent filings by the same engineer, across two employers' names.

Goodrich names it, 1923

The word zipper does not appear in either of Sundback's patents. Wikipedia reports that the term, popular in North America, came from the B. F. Goodrich Company in 1923, when it used Sundback's fastener on a new line of rubber boots, galoshes, and referred to it as the zipper. The name stuck. The same article notes that the two chief uses of the zipper in its early years were closing boots and tobacco pouches, not clothing.

How it reached clothing

Adoption in garments was slow. Wikipedia credits the zipper with beating the button on men's trousers in 1937, in what it calls the "Battle of the Fly," after French fashion designers praised zippers in men's trousers. A Talon advertisement in the first issue of Esquire called it the "Newest Tailoring Idea for Men," and promised among the zippered fly's virtues that it would exclude "The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray." The advert is quoted in the Wikipedia article, which cites Esquire; we have not seen the original page.

A later innovation allowed zippers to open at both ends, as on jackets. The metal zipper still uses individual teeth of brass, aluminum or nickel set on tape at regular intervals, according to the same article, and the Japanese firm YKK is named there as pioneering a 56S aluminum alloy in 1958.

What this means for a quick answer

• Judson: shoe fastener with a slider, patented in the 1890s, jammed in use.
• Sundback: separable fastener patents of April 29, 1913 and March 20, 1917, the second the design behind the modern interlocking zipper.
• Goodrich: coined the word zipper in 1923 for rubber boots.
• Adoption in trousers: 1937, per Wikipedia.

If you are writing a caption, say "Gideon Sundback's 1917 patent is the basis of the modern zipper, and Whitcomb Judson's 1890s fastener was its ancestor." That claim matches the documents. Avoid saying Sundback invented it from nothing, and avoid saying Judson invented the zipper itself, because the word, the interlocking teeth and the mass production were all later.

One more honest caveat: we have not been able to open the Smithsonian or Britannica entries, so this account rests on two U.S. patents and a heavily edited reference article. Where those could differ, such as the exact year Judson's first patent issued, we cite the patents Wikipedia lists and note the date as given.