Making A Giant Zipper To Explain How It Works

How does a zipper actually work? Like, try to push down on the zipper from above and it probably won't budge. But if you just use the pull tab, suddenly it's buttery smooth. So, how does it do this?

We've made more zippers than there are stars in the Milky Way. You probably used one 10 times today without even noticing, except the only time you do is when one breaks. I'll show you what to do when this happens. But what is actually going on inside this thing?

I mean, obviously the teeth come together inside the slider, but it turns out there is a surprising amount of engineering to this thing. All of this is too small to see on a real zipper, which is why we made this one. This is a video about the surprising genius of zippers. >> What is that?

>> This is a device that basically started it all. The idea was just to take a a bunch of hooks and eyes and try to put them together in some fashion to make them quote automatic unquote. >> The hooks seem very sharp. Like I don't think I'd want this on my fly.

>> No. No. Oh, definitely not. There.

>> By the 1800s, clothes were typically fastened using laces, buttons, brooches, and hooks and eyes. These got the job done, but they all share the same flaw. If you had a series of these fasteners on a piece of clothing, well, you had to close them one by one. >> Most people were satisfied with the state of affairs.

But one man, American engineer Whitam Judson, thought the world deserved something better. >> The idea primarily, it appears to be that he would put them in shoes and people who had to lace up would be able to do it in one quick motion. So that was the device that he had in mind and um it didn't work. Judson was a pretty bad inventor.

Most of his patents had never gotten much traction, but he was a great salesman. In 1893 at the Chicago Worlds Fair, he presented this fastening device as the next big thing, claiming that in no time at all, this would replace buttons and laces, and not just on shoes, but on all sorts of garments. A few wealthy investors actually believed it. So, with their backing, ...