A World Unzipped Is Unthinkable

I have come to the Deep South in sweltering summer because it was biting cold in Alaska last winter.

Back then, a veteran mountaineer named Dick Flaharty made me a 40-below parka in his Fairbanks shop, Apocalypse Design. Flaharty has a reputation for making gear to match Arctic winter, and when I arrived his people looked me over as if to determine whether a Californian could be worthy of their labors.

What makes this parka special? Well, it is hand-cut. It is gimmick-free. The insulation is not the latest, but Flaharty’s been using it for 20 years without a failure. And it has a toothy, very serious No. 8 YKK Vislon zipper.

I must have seemed puzzled.

Someone explained: When it’s 40 below, you don’t want your zipper to let you down.

In the months ahead, I bounced down wilderness trails in the far North. The steel hook of a dog sled ripped open the chest of the parka so it is now patched. When the coat became damp and froze stiff, I had to thaw it over a fire. The insulation cushioned what Alaskans call a hard landing when a blizzard forced down a tiny bush plane in which I was a passenger. On many days, my breath would form an ice rind around my face and I would find myself frozen to my parka. At night, the coat sometimes served as my tent and sleeping bag. The zipper never let me down.

Like all practiced consumers, I thought I’d heard every kind of sales pitch. The newest this, the latest that. The gee-whiz of technology. Nobody ever got my credit card by singing praises to the humble zipper, until now.

This fact alone was novel enough to ponder: Every day we entrust to zippers nothing less precious than our modesty and our money, and we also expect they will never let us down.

But, of course, it was not always so.

Where did the zipper come from?

We once knew. For the zipper was a cultural sensation when we finally got one that worked properly. It took a long time too. But that seems to have been forgotten, just as the zipper itself slipped from our conscious consideration. It is now a part of life, like Portland cement, that once but no longer inspires wonder.

Naturally, the zipper has a story and, as happens, it’s better told here in central Georgia than anywhere else. In the green, damp suburbs of Macon, Japanese executives and American workers operate the largest zipper factory in the world: 12 separate plants spread through softwood forests. This automated 304-acre complex of YKK USA operates around the clock, through weekends, producing 7 million zippers a day in 427 standard colors and 1,500 varieties.

For about 100 years now, this marvel of American ingenuity has been holding us together and along the way changed the way we dress, hurried us along in our days, contributed color to the language and gave rise to an array of human foibles and scandals.

Powerful connotations surround our zippers. Zippers are gag lines for urban myths and modern movies. Under some circumstances, a slider moving over zipper teeth creates an unmistakable “yes” sound that is both mechanical and lascivious. “Little alligators of ecstasy, that’s what zippers are,” in the words of novelist Tom Robbins.

Today, if you’re an average American, you consume one zipper a month, 12 a year, nearly 1,000 in a lifetime. More if you are parents of triplets or drive a Harley-Davidson.

The World Before Zippers

That we have anything to commemorate by way of a zipper is itself a curiosity. For the longest time, hardly anyone thought one was necessary. The world already had satisfactory attachments with buttons and buckles and all that. By the time anyone had the afterthought to dream up the hookless slide fastener, many of the sensations from the era already were invented: the gasoline engine, the typewriter, the cash register and aspirin, to name some.

Back then what farsighted individual could have guessed that we would find ourselves in such a rush today to fasten our blue jeans, close our gym bags, secure our purses and briefcases, cinch up our jackets and dash out the door? Who would have guessed that groundskeepers would be zipping up artificial fields of play for America’s pastime? Or, for that matter, zipping together floating oil-spill booms and bucket seat upholstery to serve the industry of the gasoline engine?

Who might have thought that the words impeachment and zipper would figure in the same gossipy tale of governance?

In 1938, the London Daily Express asked readers to list distinctive inventions of the age.

No. 1 answer was the zipper. This is according to University of Maryland professor Robert Friedel, whose book “Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty” is the first word on zippers.

Today, the zipper provides novelty of a different sort: a quiet example of an industry that runs counter to trends.

For one thing, despite the importation of so much of our clothing, luggage and sporting goods, America is still the leader in zipper manufacturing. YKK is by far the largest domestic manufacturer, with plants here and also a factory in Orange County. To try to keep it that way, YKK USA, a subsidiary of a Japanese firm, devotes much of its research budget to developing machines to help domestic companies install zippers cheaply.

Instead of subcontracting work, it operates on the contrary theory: Success means doing everything itself. YKK smelts its own brass, concocts its own polyester, spins and twists its own thread, weaves and color-dyes cloth for its zipper tapes, forges and molds its scooped zipper teeth, extrudes the monofilament for coil zippers, hammers and paints the sliders, clamps the stops, attaches the dangley pulls in a thousand varieties, and even fabricates the cardboard boxes in which zippers are packaged. Naturally, YKK makes the machines that make the components.

To stand inside any of the dozen factory buildings here is to be immediately acquainted with the sensation of being an insect in some vast underground hive, surrounded by endless thousands of gangly steel arthropods, vibrating and screaming, and spitting out great toothy membranes.

Behind the zipper’s success is the genius of two inventors and many years of trial and error.

In the autumn of 1893, Whitcomb Judson, a Chicago machine salesman and technological dreamer, patented a sliding shoe fastener that suggests a zipper. Instead of teeth, the inventor used hooks and eyes. Unfortunately, Judson submitted only drawings in support of his patent. Building a zipper that actually functioned proved highly problematic, and it took the rest of the decade for the first clumsy zippers to gain notice.

Zipping Into the 22nd Century!

In 1917, Swedish immigrant Gideon Sundback, an electrical engineer working in Hoboken, N.J., finally patented the precision combination of teeth-and-slider that we know today--and, if the science-fiction movies can be believed, the same zipper we will know for the next thousand years.

One early investor was actor James O’Neill, the father of playwright Eugene O’Neill. According to research by Duke University engineering professor Henry Petroski, author of “The Evolution of Useful Things,” O’Neill foresaw quicker costume changes for stage performers.

Not until 1923 were any of these inventions called zippers. That year, B.F. Goodrich introduced quick-fastening galoshes called the Mystic. The rubber boots with slide fasteners were fine, but not the name. “Zipper” had more spark. Goodrich trademarked the brand for its boots, but the public had different ideas.

In the late 1930s and then again after World War II, the zipper made rapid gains in acceptance, reflecting society’s desire for ease and speed. Not coincidentally, those periods also saw the spread of, first, broadcasting, and, second, frozen TV dinners.

When Americans found themselves with lots of leisure time and spare money, they went skiing. But metal zippers on ski jackets began popping open and jamming closed at the wrong time because metal expands and contracts according to temperature differences at the top and bottom of ski lifts. Behold the popularity of the nylon zipper, which retains its size in cold and heat.

A contemporary variant of this is the molded Vislon zipper of my parka, with broad-shouldered, aesthetically pleasing teeth, slickened to shed ice and dirt.

The plastic coil zipper was introduced in 1960 by Talon, a company that once dominated American zipper manufacturing as YKK does today. The best coils are stronger, cheaper and more flexible than traditional teeth in zippers. Unfortunately, also uglier.

Since then has come the bulky waterproof zipper that closes by squeezing beads of rubber together between teeth, and the rail zipper, which operates like a Zip-Loc bag with a slider attached. Now being introduced are zippers with Lycra woven into the tape backing to provide some stretch for today’s athletic clothes.

Brand-name zippers may mean little to retail customers, but established manufacturers are plagued by trademark theft and knockoffs. A particular favorite here in the Deep South was the importer who tried to sell products with KKK zippers.

According to those who follow zipper news, the world’s longest zipper is a novelty made to display at a Florida hotel cocktail lounge: 1 mile long. But virtually anyone could buy a standard 2.1-mile-long industrial coil of raw zipper “chain,” affix a slider and double the record.

The approximate width of the teeth closed, measured in millimeters, gives a zipper its size designation, from zero to 20. A zero might be used for a hidden money pocket in a jacket; a 20 for a commercial fishing net. A jeans zipper is usually a 45, or 4.5 millimeters.

At YKK, about 45% of production is brass zippers, and about half of these go into jeans, the No. 1 zipper product sold in America. Another 10% of YKK USA’s zippers are aluminum. The final 45% are what we call plastic: polyester coil zippers, nylon molded-tooth zippers and rail zippers.

Not always has the zipper seemed such a universally benign idea. In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 “Brave New World,” social controllers want to lock up the Bible and other great books for centuries in favor of machinery. A character in the book objects, asking if it’s not natural to believe in God.

Huxley’s controller replies sarcastically: “You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers.”

Of course it is, multitudes would respond today.

Look north, and you can imagine a man walking into an Alaskan roadhouse, stomping his boots and hanging an ice-encrusted parka on a nail. Does he give a thought to his zipper? Yes, I say, and fondly so.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.

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* The zipper was patented in 1917 by a Swedish immigrant but wasn’t called a zipper until 1923.

* The average American buys one zipper a month, 12 a year, nearly 1,000 in a lifetime.

* Jeans are the No. 1 zipper product sold in America.

* The world’s longest zipper is one mile long and on display at a Florida hotel cocktail lounge.

YKK is the world’s largest zipper maker, producing 7 million zippers a day.