George tried with many fabrics but finally with the team of the French weavers, he tried to get the fabric exactly like the natural burs. Velcro was in production in s but it got disappointing grades from the public because of its shabby appearance but George kept on trying and took Velcro to Lyon the then center of weaving and with the help of one weaver he improved upon his product.
Aerospace industry was the first to accept Velcro. Slowly and steadily Velcro conquered all the fields and became a great utility item.
De Mestral continued his research for the best fabric for his product as well as the perfect size of the hooks and loops. After years of research and repeated testing, Georges De Mastral discovered that heat-treated nylon is the best fabric to use because it is a strong and durable substance. But he took several years or so in developing his product because he had to design a special type of loom that could weave the fibers in just the right shape, density, and size.
Georges De Mestral finally completed the improved version of the Velcro in In each inch square of the fabric contained about hooks which had the density strong enough to stay fastened but at the same time easy enough to pull apart when needed. Georges De Mestral decided to name his product Velcro derived from the words velvet and crochet. De Mastral received a patent for Velcro from the Swiss government in after that, he took a loan and started to mass produce Velcro. He opened plants in Europe which eventually expanded to the United States and Canada.
In fact, during a fashion show in in New York City even highlighted clothing with Velcro but the critics did not like it and they said that it was cheap-looking and ugly. Despite of this, Velcro received a rise in popularity in the early s when NASA began to use Velcro to keep their things from floating around under zero-gravity. And they later added Velcro to the space suits and helmets of the astronauts because they find it more convenient compared to the zippers and snaps they used before.
It's too noisy. And its little loops get clogged with dust from the Afghan and Iraqi deserts. The so-called "hook-and-loop" fastener was added to standard issue uniforms in , but a plethora of complaints from dissatisfied soldiers led to a year-long investigation, which in turn led to an official decision to remove Velcro from military uniforms starting this August.
After nearly eight years of research apparently it's not so easy to make a synthetic burr , de Mestral successfully reproduced the natural attachment with two strips of fabric, one with thousands of tiny hooks and another with thousands of tiny loops. He named his invention Velcro, a combination of the words "velvet" and "crochet," and formally patented it in Though the first Velcro was made out of cotton, de Mestral soon discovered that nylon worked best because it didn't wear with use.
It seems there just weren't that many removable, re-useable all-surface fasteners back then. No one says "hook-and-loop fastener," just as no one says "re-sealable zipper storage bag" instead of Ziploc. It's an example of metonymy, a rhetorical figure of speech in which a brand name is used to refer to an entire category of product.
But we digress.
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