George De Mestral; Inventor of Velcro Fastener

George De Mestral, who invented the Velcro fastener 50 years ago and saw it evolve from blood pressure cuffs on Earth to manned shuttles and capsules in space, died at his home here last Thursday, his wife, Helen, said Monday. He was 82 and died of complications of bronchitis and other respiratory problems.

He had been sick for about three weeks, she said by telephone from their home in this village near Lake Geneva.

A Swiss mechanical engineer, De Mestral in 1941 conceived a fastener using two fabric strips--one covered with tiny hooks, the other with a fuzzy web the hooks could grab.

The invention came from a day in 1941 after he had gone hunting in the Jura Mountains with his Irish pointer. As he tried to pull off the cockleburs that had stuck firmly to both his wool hunting pants and his dog’s coat, he marveled at the tenacity of the hitchhiking seedpods.

Intrigued by the strength of the burs, he inspected one under a microscope. What he found were hundreds of tiny hooks.

Patented after 10 years of refinement in which De Mestral had to await the arrival of nylon to perfect his discovery and then ways in which to cut it at the proper angle, Velcro entered production in several countries in the mid-1950s. The fastener, which can also be used to replace adhesive tape, soon became a worldwide success and today is used most prominently in the fashion industry where it adjusts cuffs on winter coats or fastens wraparound skirts.

It moved into space with mankind, where it was used to attach food pouches to the walls of capsules and kept the boots of astronauts affixed to the floor in a weightless environment.

The name Velcro derives from two French words: velour, a nappy fabric, and crochet or hook.

De Mestral’s widow said she had no estimate of how much his invention had earned but told the Boston Globe in a 1980 interview that “we’re quite comfortable, but not by any means millionaires.”