I put the cry in cryptid
I am the walking dead. My brains screams at me while my body slowly decomposes
is it halloween yet?
@melisscan
I fell of the stairs and broke my hand last week but i didn’t go to the ER until yesterday. I am a perfectly sane human being yes :)
Spring has sprung!!!
And there is so much pollen in the air…
🌸🌷🌼💐💗
:)))
Ok so, Velcro is actually a company name and not a product. What we call velcro is actually a ‘hook and loop fastener”. Both the company Velcro and the hook-and-loop were founded/invented by the same person: George de Mestral, a swiss electrical engineer.
Fun fact: velcro is a combination of ‘velours’ and ‘crochet’ so it’s literally velvet-hook
The story goes that while De Mestral was on a hunting trip in 1941 he noticed that a very special plant kept sticking to him and his dog…or rather the seed pods did
Introducing
Burdock
(Burdock or wild rhubarb as a plant has a separate and very long history as a medicinal plant spanning across Eurasia and North America)
Or in this case, the Burdock seed pods specifically which up close look like this:
See where this is going?
De mestral, the ever inventive and curious man (this was bound to happen, he tried to patent his toy airplane as a 12 yr old and also made an asparagus peeler), looked at the seed pods under a microscope and decided that he could probably make a synthetic version that could work as an inbetween of buttons and zippers.
He traveled around Europe looking for a manufacturer, but they all told him that mass-manufacturing was out of the question. He finally found one in Lyon, France who could make a nylon-cotton fabric.
With that fabric he created the first velcro BY HAND and was able to receive a patent in 1955.
The hardest part was making the tiny tiny hooks. With the cotton-nylon blend, he was able to make them but ONLY by hand. He took the hooks and would attach them to a separate piece of fabric using tiny loops.
Imagine taking nylon and making tiny hooks like these by hand. Yeah
He didn’t come up with the mass-manufacturing until a couple years later when he came up with a system that was basically a loom that used barber’s clippers to cut the nylon at a precise angle.
Anyway~ he actually then started selling mass-manufactured velcro in Europe and the US in the 60s but people didn’t really like it
Velcro then went from a weird little thing to ‘oh shit astronauts use this in space to keep stuff from flying everywhere’ and ‘mommy, I want a velcro watch like Buzz Aldrin. Please~”
And that dear friends, is the story of Velcro and the swiss dude who noticed an annoying quirk of a plant’s will to reproduce
velcro is kinda crazy if u think about it
something for those who aren’t typically favored in the “dark academia” aesthetic
Any pronouns. Capricorn. Not a minor. Chaotic Good// Sapphic with a love of tea, gardens, plants, books, embroidery, and bugs
237 posts