Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

by Charles Panati

  By the sixth century B.C, Greek and Roman women fastened their robes on the shoulder and upper arm with a fibula. This was an innovative pin in which the middle was coiled, producing tension and providing the fastener with a spring-like opening action. The fibula was a step closer to the modern safety pin.

  In Greece, straight stick pins were used as ornamental jewelry. “Stilettos,” in ivory and bronze, measuring six to eight inches, adorned hair and clothes. Aside from belts, pins remained the predominant way to fasten garments. And the more complex wraparound and slip-on clothing became, the more numerous were the fastening pins required. A palace inventory of 1347 records the delivery of twelve thousand pins for the wardrobe of a French princess.

  Not surprisingly, the handmade pins were often in short supply. The scarcity could drive up prices, and there are instances in history of serfs taxed to provide feudal lords with money for pins. In the late Middle Ages, to remedy a pin shortage and stem the overindulgence in and hoarding of pins, the British government passed a law allowing pinmakers to market their wares only on certain days of the year. On the specified days, upper-and lower-class women, many of whom had assiduously saved “pin money,” flocked to shops to purchase the relatively expensive items. Once the price of pins plummeted as a result of mass machine production, the phrase “pin money” was equally devalued, coming to mean “a wife’s pocket money,” a pittance sufficient to purchase only pins.

  The esteemed role of pins in the history of garments was seriously undermined by the ascendancy of the functional button.

  Garment pins from the Bronze Age (top); three Roman safety pins, c. 500 B.C. (middle); modern version. Pinned garments gave way to clothes that buttoned from neck to hem.

  Button: 2000 B.C., Southern Asia

  Buttons did not originate as clothes fasteners. They were decorative, jewelry-like disks sewn on men’s and women’s clothing. And for almost 3,500 years, buttons remained purely ornamental; pins and belts were viewed as sufficient to secure garments.

  The earliest decorative buttons date from about 2000 B.C. and were unearthed at archaeological digs in the Indus Valley. They are seashells, of various mollusks, carved into circular and triangular shapes, and pierced with two holes for sewing them to a garment.

  The early Greeks and Romans used shell buttons to decorate tunics, togas, and mantles, and they even attached wooden buttons to pins that fastened to clothing as a broach. Elaborately carved ivory and bone buttons, many leafed with gold and studded with jewels, were retrieved from European ruins. But nowhere, in illustration, text, or garment fragment, is there the slightest indication that an ancient tailor conceived the idea of opposing a button with a buttonhole.

  When did the noun “button” become a verb? Surprisingly, not until the thirteenth century.

  Buttonhole. The practice of buttoning a garment originated in Western Europe, and for two reasons.

  In the 1200s, baggy, free-flowing attire was beginning to be replaced with tighter, form-fitting clothing. A belt alone could not achieve the look, and while pins could (and often did), they were required in quantity; and pins were easily misplaced or lost. With sewn-on buttons, there was no daily concern over finding fasteners when dressing.

  The second reason for the introduction of buttons with buttonholes involved fabric. Also in the 1200s, finer, more delicate materials were being used for garments, and the repeated piercing of fabrics with straight pins and safety pins damaged the cloth.

  Thus, the modern, functional button finally arrived. But it seemed to make up for lost time with excesses. Buttons and buttonholes appeared on every garment. Clothes were slit from neck to ankle simply so that a parade of buttons could be used to close them. Slits were made in impractical places—along sleeves and down legs—just so the wearer could display buttons that actually buttoned. And buttons were contiguous, as many as two hundred closing a woman’s dress—enough to discourage undressing. If searching for misplaced safety pins was time-consuming, buttoning garments could not have been viewed as a time-saver.

  Statues, illustrations, and paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attest to button mania. The mode peaked in the next century, when buttons, in gold and silver and studded with jewels, were sewn on clothing merely as decorative features—as before the creation of the buttonhole.

  In 1520, French king Francis I, builder of Fontainebleau castle, ordered from his jeweler 13,400 gold buttons, which were fastened to a single black velvet suit. The occasion was a meeting with England’s Henry VII, held with great pomp and pageantry on the Field of Cloth of Gold near Calais, where Francis vainly sought an alliance with Henry.

  Henry himself was proud of his jeweled buttons, which were patterned after his rings. The buttoned outfit and matching rings were captured on canvas by the German portrait painter Hans Holbein.

  The button craze was somewhat paralleled in this century, in the 1980s, though with zippers. Temporarily popular were pants and shirts with zipped pockets, zipped openings up the arms and legs, zipped flaps to flesh, and myriad other zippers to nowhere.

  Right and Left Buttoning. Men button clothes from right to left, women from left to right. Studying portraits and drawings of buttoned garments, fashion historians have traced the practice back to the fifteenth century. And they believe they understand its origin.

  Men, at court, on travels, and on the battlefield, generally dressed themselves. And since most humans are right-handed, the majority of men found it expeditious to have garments button from right to left.

  Women who could afford the expensive buttons of the day had female dressing servants. Maids, also being predominantly right-handed, and facing buttons head-on, found it easier to fasten their mistresses’ garments if the buttons and buttonholes were sewn on in a mirror-image reversal. Tailors complied, and the convention has never been altered or challenged.

  Judson’s original hook-and-eye zipper; created to replace shoelaces.

  Zipper: 1893, Chicago

  The zipper had no ancient counterpart, nor did it originate in a sudden blaze of ingenuity. It emerged out of a long and patient technological struggle, requiring twenty years to transform the idea into a marketplace reality, and an additional ten years to persuade people to use it. And the zipper was not conceived as a clothes fastener to compete with buttons, but as a slide to close high boots, replacing the long, buttonhooked shoelaces of the 1890s.

  On August 29, 1893, a mechanical engineer living in Chicago, Whitcomb Judson, was awarded a patent for a “clasp-locker.” At the time, there was nothing in the patent office files that even remotely resembled Judson’s prototype zipper. Two clasp-lockers were already in use: one on Judson’s own boots, the other on the boots of his business partner, Lewis Walker.

  Although Judson, who held a dozen patents for motors and railroad brakes, had an established reputation as a practical inventor, he found no one interested in the clasp-locker. The formidable-looking device consisted of a linear sequence of hook-and-eye locks, resembling a medieval implement of torture more than it did a modern time-saver.

  To drum up interest, Judson put the clasp-locker on display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. But the twenty-one million viewers who poured into the fairgrounds flocked to the world’s first electric Ferris wheel and the titillating “Coochee-Coochee” sideshow, featuring the belly dancer Little Egypt. The world’s first zipper was ignored.

  Judson and Walker’s company, Universal Fastener, did receive an order from the United States Postal Service for twenty zipper mail bags. But the zippers jammed so frequently that the bags were discarded. Although Whitcomb Judson continued making improvements on his clasp fastener, perfection of the device fell to another inventor: Swedish-American engineer Gideon Sundback. Abandoning Judson’s hook-and-eye design, Sundback, in 1913, produced a smaller, lighter, more reliable fastener, which was the modern zipper. And the first orders for Sundback’s zippers came from the U.S. Army, for use on clothing and equipment during World War I.


  At home, zippers appeared on boots, money belts, and tobacco pouches. Not until around 1920 did they begin to appear on civilian clothing.

  The early zippers were not particularly popular. A metal zipper rusted easily, so it had to be unstitched before a garment was washed and sewed back in after the garment had dried. Another problem involved public education: Unlike the more evident insertion of a button into a buttonhole, something even a child quickly mastered, the fastening of a zipper was not obvious to the uninitiated. Zippered garments came with small instruction manuals on the operation and maintenance of the device.

  In 1923, the B. F. Goodrich Company introduced rubber galoshes with the new “hookless fasteners.” Mr. Goodrich himself is credited with coining the echoic name “zipper,” basing it on the “z-z-z-zip” sound his own boots made when closing. Goodrich renamed his new product “Zipper Boots,” and he ordered 150,000 zippers from the Hookless Fastener Company, which would later change its name to Talon. The unusual name “zipper,” as well as increased reliability and rustproofing, greatly helped popularize zippers.

  Concealed under a flap, the zipper was a common fastener on clothing by the late ’20s. It became a fashion accessory in its own right in 1935, when renowned designer Elsa Schiaparelli introduced a spring clothing collection which The New Yorker described as “dripping with zippers.” Schiaparelli was the first fashion designer to produce colored zippers, oversized zippers, and zippers that were decorative and nonfunctional.

  After a slow birth and years of rejection, the zipper found its way into everything from plastic pencil cases to sophisticated space suits. Unfortunately, Whitcomb Judson, who conceived a truly original idea, died in 1909, believing that his invention might never find a practical application.

  Velcro: 1948, Switzerland

  For several decades, it appeared that no invention could ever threaten the zipper’s secure position in the garment industry. Then along came Velcro, one man’s attempt to create synthetic burs like the small prickly thistle balls produced as seedpods on cocklebur bushes.

  During an Alpine hike in 1948, Swiss mountaineer George de Mestral became frustrated by the burs that clung annoyingly to his pants and socks. While picking them off, he realized that it might be possible to produce a fastener based on the burs to compete with, if not obsolete, the zipper.

  Today a Velcro fastener consists of two nylon strips, one containing thousands of tiny hooks, the other, tiny eyes. Pressing the strips together locks the hooks into the eyes. To perfect that straightforward idea required ten years of effort.

  Textile experts de Mestral consulted scoffed at the idea of man-made burs. Only one, a weaver at a textile plant in Lyon, France, believed the idea was feasible. Working by hand on a special undersized loom, he managed to produce two strips of cotton fabric, one with tiny hooks, the other with smaller eyes. Pressed together, the strips stuck adequately and remained united until they were pulled apart. De Mestral christened the sample “locking tape.”

  Developing equipment to duplicate the delicate handwork of the weaver required technological advances. Cotton was replaced by the more durable nylon, for repeated opening and closing of the original strips damaged the soft hooks and eyes. One significant breakthrough came when de Mestral discovered that pliant nylon thread, woven under infrared light, hardened to form almost indestructible hooks and eyes. By the mid-1950s, the first nylon locking tape was a reality. For a trademark name, de Mestral choose vel from “velvet,” simply because he liked the sound of the word, and cro from the French crochet, the diminutive for “hook.”

  By the late ’50s, textile looms were turning out sixty million yards of Velcro a year. And although the nylon fastener did not replace the zipper, as de Mestral hoped it would, it found diverse zipper-like applications—sealing chambers of artificial hearts, securing gear in the gravity-free environment of space, and of course zipping dresses, bathing suits, and diapers. The list is endless, though not yet as endless as George de Mestral had once envisioned.

  Umbrella: 1400 B.C., Mesopotamia

  An emblem of rank and distinction, the umbrella originated in Mesopotamia 3,400 years ago as an extension of the fan. For these early umbrellas did not protect Mesopotamians from rain, a rarity in their desert land, but from harsh sun. And umbrellas continued to serve primarily as sunshades for centuries, a fact evident in the word “umbrella,” derived from the Latin umbra, “shade.” In many African societies today, an umbrella bearer walks behind the tribal chief to shield his head from sun—reflecting the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian tradition.

  By 1200 B.C., the Egyptian umbrella had acquired religious significance. The entire canopy of the sky was believed to be formed by the body of the celestial goddess Nut. Spanning the earth as a vast umbrella, she touched the ground only with her toes and fingertips. Her star-studded belly created the night sky. Man-made umbrellas became earthly embodiments of Nut, held only above heads of nobility. An invitation to stand in the penumbra of the royal umbrella was a high honor, the shade symbolizing the king’s protection. Palm fronds, feathers, and stretched papyrus were the materials for umbrellas, as they were for fans.

  The Greeks and the Romans borrowed liberally from Egyptian culture, but they regarded the umbrella as effeminate. It was rarely used by men. There are numerous derisive references by sixth-century B.C. Greek writers concerning men who carry sunshields “as women do.” For many centuries, the only occasion when a Greek man might excusably be seen holding an umbrella in public was to protect the head of a female companion.

  The situation was entirely opposite for women. Greek women of high rank carried white parasols. And once a year they engaged in the Feast of Parasols, a fertility procession staged at the Acropolis.

  But it was Roman women, with their own parasol celebration, who began the practice of oiling paper sunshades to waterproof them. Roman historians record that a drizzle at an outdoor amphitheater could result in hundreds of women lifting view-obstructing umbrellas, to the annoyance of male spectators. Debate arose over the use of rain umbrellas at public events, and in the first century A.D., the issue was put before Emperor Domitian, who ruled in favor of women’s protecting themselves with oiled parasols.

  Sun parasols and rain umbrellas remained predominantly female accessories of dress well into the eighteenth century in Europe—and beyond that time in America. Men wore hats and got soaked. More than a casual attempt to escape the elements was seen as unmanly. The sixteenth-century French author Henri Estienne summed up the European sentiment toward men with umbrellas: “If French women saw men carrying them, they would consider them effeminate.”

  It was a British gentleman, Jonas Hanway, who made umbrellas respectable raingear for men. He accomplished that transformation only through dogged perseverance, humiliation, and public ridicule.

  Hanway acquired a fortune in trading with Russia and the Far East, then retired at age thirty-eight, devoting himself to founding hospitals and orphanages. And to popularizing the umbrella, a passion of his.

  Beginning in 1750, Hanway seldom ventured outdoors, rain or shine, without an umbrella. He always caused a sensation. Former business associates suddenly viewed him as epicene; street hooligans jeered as he passed; and coachmen, envisioning their livelihood threatened by the umbrella as a legitimate means of shelter from the rain, steered through puddles to splash him with gutter mud.

  Undaunted, Hanway carried an umbrella for the final thirty years of his life. Gradually, men realized that a one-time investment in an umbrella was cheaper than hailing a coach every time it rained—in London, a considerable savings. Perhaps it was the economics of the situation, or a case of familiarity breeding indifference, but the stigma of effeminacy long associated with the umbrella lifted. Before Jonas Hanway’s death in 1786, umbrellas were toted on rainy days by British gentlemen and, in fact, referred to as “Hanways.”

  Modern Rainwear: 1830, Scotland

  The history of rainwear is as old as the hist
ory of clothing itself. Early man, to protect himself from rain, fashioned water-repellent cloaks and head coverings by weaving waxy leaves and grass and stitching together strips of greased animal hide. The water-repellent coatings applied to materials varied from culture to culture.

  The ancient Egyptians, for instance, waxed linen and oiled papyrus, while the Chinese varnished and lacquered paper and silk. But it was the South American Indians who paved the way for convenient, lightweight, truly effective rubberized raingear.

  In the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers to the New World observed natives coating their capes and moccasins with a milky white resin from a local tree, Hevea brasiliensis. The pure white sap coagulated and dried, leaving the coated garment stiff but pliant. The Spaniards named the substance “tree milk,” and copying the Indians’ method of bleeding trees, they brushed the liquid on their coats, capes, hats, pants, and the soles of their boots. The garments effectively repelled rain, but in the heat of day the repellent became gummy, accumulating dried grass, dirt, and dead leaves which, by the cool of evening, were encrusted in the coating.

  The sap was taken back to Europe. Noted scientists of the day experimented to improve its properties. In 1748, French astronomer François Fresneau developed a chemical method that rendered the tree sap, when painted on fabric, more pliant and less gummy, but the chemical additives themselves had an intolerably unpleasant odor.

  Another failed experiment at least gave the sap a name. In 1770, Joseph Priestley, the great British chemist and the discoverer of oxygen, was working to improve the milky latex. Coincidentally, he observed that a piece of congealed sap would rub out graphite marks, which suggested a practical name. It was not until 1823 that a fifty-seven-year-old Scottish chemist, Charles Macintosh, made a monumental discovery that ushered in the era of modern rubberized rainwear.