NONFICTION - April 24, 1994

ZIPPER! An Exploration in Novelty by Robert Friedel (W.W. Norton: $23; 256 pp.). The headline of the brief, undated news story, which seems to have run in a New Jersey newspaper sometime around 1907, reads “Joy! Bliss! Beatitude! Self-Hooking Waist Found.” The casual reader might assume from the foregoing that the lowly zipper, to which the article refers, was about to take the country by storm, but that wasn’t the case; the first, rudimentary “slide fastener” had in fact been patented more than a decade earlier, and it would be another 30 years before the device became a permanent part of the cultural landscape. Robert Friedel, historian of technology at the University of Maryland, here recounts the zipper’s rise to prominence, and it’s a fascinating story largely because the ascent was so slow and uncertain. For years the zipper was produced by just one small company, today known as Talon, which was much more adept at manufacturing than marketing; in some early years most of the company’s profits were produced by a single salesman (the famous, in some circles, Willie Wear), and until the 1930s the zipper was sold primarily to manufacturers. By the late 1930s, the fashion world’s resistance to zippers was overcome and the burgeoning, now-competitive industry was selling more than 100 million zippers annually “Zipper!” celebrates a wonderful bit of Americana, to be sure, but it’s a serious work of history as well, Friedel using the zipper to illustrate the complex network of relationships among businessmen, inventors, salesmen and customers essential to making a novel product commercially successful.