BOOK REVIEW / HISTORY : A ‘Fasten-ating,’ Historical Look at the Ubiquitous Zipper : ZIPPER An Exploration in Novelty; <i> by Robert Friedel</i> / W.W. Norton $23, 288 pages

When I first moved to Pasadena, a friend told me about a shop on Colorado Boulevard where the owner did nothing but fix and sell zippers. Gathering up a pile of jeans, skirts, sleeping bags and a piece of hand luggage, I hurried to meet the magician who could make them all whole again.

Zippers have always puzzled me. Like escalators, they symbolize the quintessentially machine-made. For the life of me, I could not understand how either worked, except that each contains a series of identical metal cogs that move, mysteriously changing form but always ending up the way they began.

After reading Robert Friedel’s “Zipper,” the remarkable saga of the staccato evolution of a peculiar example of mechanical wizardry, I drove back to the zipper shop last week to speak to the magician.

Alas, he was gone. He had disappeared along with the Talon company that once dominated the zipper industry. Talon, having grown from a shaky beginning as the Hookless Fastener Co. in 1921 to become the single largest employer in pre-World War II Meadville, Pa. (it even had its own radio station: WZPR), shut down in the wake of 1980s foreign competition.

Once marketed as a novelty, zippers have become a staple--along with safety pins (an elaboration on the fibula the Romans used on their togas), buttons, hooks, snaps and other ways of holding together two pieces of material.

“Zipper” is a fascinating history of a peculiarly American enterprise, with something in it for everyone who has wondered about the enormous changes in clothing in the 20th Century: from home-made to store-bought, formal to sport, complicated shirts with separate collars to children’s clothes with zippers that fulfilled, its marketers claimed, the “self-dress” ideal of 1930s child-rearing.

A professor of American History at the University of Maryland, Friedel conjures up a world in which it was possible to ask people to remove the new fastener (lest it rust) before they did the laundry, and then to sew it in again.

Yet “Zipper” is not a frivolous book and should appeal to those of us who have toyed with patenting an invention. Friedel uses the rise of the invention to speculate on what it takes to market a novelty that no one actually needs. Zippers are fine. Most of us would miss them mightily should they disappear, but substitutes can do most jobs as well, if not as swiftly.

What it took was the determination, faith and confidence of a series of men who happened to be the right people at the right time. Each brought the “hookless fastener,” as it was called for at least 20 years before it found what seems the most natural name in the world, another step toward becoming a household item and a household word.

These men included Whitcomb Judson, who patented the first generation of hookless fasteners, updating and improving them for years. And like other supporters of laissez-faire economics, he made his first big sale to the U.S. government, which put his fasteners on mail sacks. Judson was followed by Lewis Walker, a salesman-entrepreneur who kept the company going, and Gideon Sundback, an engineer who took the crude fastener that Judson had toiled over and made it into a dependable gadget.

Among the lessons that “Zipper” offers is the fact that this wonderful device was not an instant success. Even historical landmarks such as World War I that helped other technologies did nothing more than keep the zipper alive in the public mind. The Post Office sale turned into a onetime thing, as did the use of the zipper on the money belts given to the 24,000 doughboys who went abroad.

Then in 1921, the Goodyear rubber company installed hookless fasteners on their new galoshes and called them Zip boots. Eventually the fashion ended, but the name zipper stuck. Yet even this style, which lasted for years, was not enough to make zippers the ubiquitous commodity they were to become.

Even as Talon, who owned the patents, perfected the gizmo and defended it against copycats, society was changing. New zippers were easier to slide and more dependable, and by the mid-’30s, fashion designers had introduced them into the fly of gentleman’s trousers and the seams of slinky ladies’ dresses. In the heyday of the first stages of sexual liberation, the zipper symbolized the intellectual stripteaser who sings while unzipping in Rodgers and Hart’s 1940 production of “Pal Joey.”

These sexual overtones remained into the ‘70s, when novelist Erica Jong idealized sex without a zipper. In fact, Friedel tells us, the zipper is the cardinal 20th-Century symbol. There are zipper myths retold in every culture, as zippers bring together what Friedel sees as the themes of “sexuality, mechanism, cleverness, opening and closing, attaching and releasing, revealing and hiding.”

The zipper is, of course, a part of modern life. The curious thing is how nonessential it is. Not only did its inventors have to make it really work, they had to convince the world that it was an improvement over whatever they were already using.