Zipper

Stubborn Swede finds two great loves at once

Otto Frederick Gideon Sundback (Odestugu, Jönköping, April 24, 1880 – Meadville, Pennsylvania, June 21, 1954)

A zipper looks complex and it is. Successive technicians worked on the first copy for 31 years and it was the Swede Sundback who brought the adventure to a successful end in the United States.

Otto Frederick Gideon Sundback studied electrical engineering and traveled to the United States in 1905, aged 25, where engineers were short at the time. The first thing he did was delete all his first names.

He hated them all and drew only the letter G for the rest of his life. He immediately got a job at the electricity giant Westinghouse and was allowed to work as a draftsman in a design office that designed the plans for the giant Niagara power station.

He lived and worked in Pittsburgh not far from the small town of Meadville, where a number of people had been putting their savings for many years into a small company then called Hook and Eye Company. Hooks and eyes? That's what the primal zipper looked like, a kind of chain of hooks and eyes.

Peter Aronson, the studio's Swedish mechanic, was at the end of his tether. The business was close to bankruptcy. Aronson came across Sundback through his Swedish contacts.

He enlisted his help, but Sundback was not interested. One day Sundback got into a fight with his boss and in a bad mood went to take a look at the bizarre mini-company where something with snags was made. There he met not only Aronson but also his daughter Elvira.

It was love at first sight. They married and Sundback threw himself into the complex mechanism that had been tinkering with for 15 years. The young Swede traded his brilliant job at Westinghouse for a crazy adventure.

After all, the staff consisted of two men: Sundback and an assistant. To pay for his printing, he went to the printer to repair presses. He even built a machine to make paper clips for one of his creditors as payment.

The beautiful Elvira became pregnant, gave birth to a child and died in childbirth. To forget his grief, the robust Sundback worked day and night on the cursed closing mechanism. He started from scratch. But to no avail.

In 1912 the company went bankrupt and Sundback retreated like a hermit to a small shed.

One day, it was December 1913, he came up with the idea of equipping the two sides of the closure with identical, nesting cup-shaped elements, the same double teeth system. That was the big breakthrough.

Sundback's genius really showed in the revolutionary machine that produced the closure to the nearest hundredth of a millimetre: the most precise machine in the world at the time. In 1914, the modern zipper came on the market.

Unfortunately, no one was waiting for that closure. Connoisseurs knew that the thing had already failed a hundred times. Most people had never heard of it and so they had no need for it. But Sundback passionately continued to refine his invention.

The first order came in 1917 from a company that manufactured money belts for the army. It was not until six years later, when the Goodrich company launched rubber boots with a zipper, that you could speak of a success; This success had been delayed for 31 years.

In 1937, Sundback's firm had 3,400 employees. In 1973 she was able to spit out 500 kilometers of zipper in one work shift.

Sundback became well-to-do and lived happily ever after. He remarried and had four children. A friend once said that a stone wall ran right through his character.

In everything related to his inventions and experiments he was very headstrong, extremely stubborn and showed no patience with people who could not follow him.

On the other hand, he was known for his unusual hospitality. As that friend said, “He made a guest feel like every occasion was unique and that every guest was the center of attention.

He not only dragged food and drink or stimulated conversation, he always encouraged friends and acquaintances to make music.' He loved opera and had an organ machine in his living room. As often as he could, he returned to his beloved Sweden.

He died in 1954 in the small town of Meadville, where he had encountered his great love and at the same time those cursed snags of which he had made a world success.