A DESIGN WITH TEETH

For two winters, I have been in a battle with the zipper on my jacket.

One of the tiny teeth is probably off line but a stubborn effort seems to overcome it.  For that reason, I still keep the jacket, which is warm.  But every time I put it on, get into the fight, win and zip up, I come face to face with that annoying flaw.

It is a good thing that design flaws are the gateways to insight.

The best designs barely rate a second thought, simply because they do not even seem to have been designed at all.  The pencil, the bicycle, left and right shoes…surely these have all been there in their original forms right from the start.  No insight, no evolution.  But, of course, that is just an illusion of usefulness.

Every design for everything, no matter how familiar, is the result of a long struggle to find the right balance between materials, needs, and social meaning.  The zipper is one invention that achieved this illustrious mix.  The zipper is so common to encounter, and so natural to the touch, that little reflection goes into its complex engineering and fitful development.  But think about it.  Think about all the zippers there are, and how easily they zip things up, and all the connotations – moral, psychological, sexual - attached to them, and you will begin to see the penetrating and evolving role that zippers have in modern life.

Naturally, all the methods of the past – buttons, laces, ties, hooks, pins, sashes – have their fans.  But these were cumbersome, complicated, and often unreliable.  The design that is the zipper may, on the other hand, may very well prove to be our greatest attempt at true closure.

The original device was called the clasp locker, a mechanical monstrosity exhibited at the World's Colombian Exposition in 1893 by its inventor Whitcomb L. Judson.  It was the first device in which a series of metal teeth with tiny hooks engaged the spaces under adjoining hooks on an opposing row.  But Judson's design was so clumsy and snagged so easily – it also looked pretty nasty – that it failed to attract much of a following.  And following the path of all designs, scores of inventors, many of them women, immediately tried to improve on it.

In 19l3, Swedish immigrant Gideon Sundback, an employee of the Universal Fastener Company in Chicago, redesigned and streamlined a version that was patented in 1917.  The new design worked much more smoothly, looked somewhat less lethal, and even made an attractive zipping sound when zipped.  One of Sundback's most brilliant design changes was another addition we hardly think about today...attaching the metal locks of the zipper to a flexible cloth backing.  When the B.F. Goodrich Company used the device on its rubber galoshes in the 1920s, the name "zipper" was used as a marketing device.  And the rest is fastening history.

The inevitable redesigns and revisions over the years largely deal with tooth size and material.  Sure there have been zipper competitors – from Velcro all the way to the plastic tubules of Ziploc bags – but none of these has yet replaced the classic in our minds and hearts.  Despite its design flaws, there is just something comforting and conclusive in the feel of a zipped zipper.  What could be better? 

Unless of course, your zipper gets jammed like mine does.  And at that point every year when I take it out of the closet, there is only one question that matters to my designing mind…what’s next?