The zipper's history shows how even great ideas can fail at first | Hacker News Reader

The zipper's history shows how even great ideas can fail at first

quartzy.qz.com

74 pointsprostoalex20 comments

Fascinating read. Interesting to see how zipper's evolution into today's ubiquitous household utility went through many stages of evolution, including the classic S-curve that today's successful tech products almost (inevitably) go through -- a testament to robustness of economic theories across widely varying industries. [0]

Another interesting fact that blew my mind recently -- 80% of all the world's zippers are manufactured in a city entirely dedicated to manufacturing clothing harnesses (hook-and-eye, Velcro et al.) in southeastern China. [1]

[0] http://innovationzen.com/blog/2006/08/17/innovation-manageme... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiaotou,_Yongjia_County

I hate the way the big-shots at all the Aerosol Velcro manufacturers get together and put different amounts of hooks and loops into the two cans, so you always have some left over. Kind of like the Hotdog Conspiracy. Well they're not ripping off this nitwit anymore!

https://www.exploratorium.edu/blogs/tangents/hotdog-conspira...

One day, I said to myself, why is it hot dog buns come in packages of 8, but hot dogs come in packages of...8?

I guess it depends on the brand.

I read or heard somewhere the major clothing brands consider YKK zippers so reliable they won't even look at competitors product, even at substantial discounts, the zipper being such a small portion of the total cost of goods, but a critical point of failure that could easily ruin their brand.

That may have been true 10 or 20 years ago, but YKK is not the biggest zipper supplier any more. That honor goes to SBS, a Chinese company.

Citation needed.

That's interesting, because I have a jacket that was cheap and is generally durable but the zipper has jammed and derailed sometimes, so I went to look at it, and guess what - it's stamped with CMZ, and indeed, that is a zipper manufacturer that is not YKK.

This is normally how I tell the quality of an article of clothing. Though sometimes it's not the zipper that fails but what it's stitched on.

So I guess we can trace back the origins of Lean manufacturing back to 1851 ;-)

I wonder if the wealthy / successful (outside of science fields) back then shared insights and knowledge in a similar wat as we do today, so many more could benefit.

And then, one day, Superdry was born :)

http://www.ewelinakolaczek.com/images/pic/A1f9lbzZ-683_11431...

Oddly I have a superdry jacket like that and one of the zips failed

It would not surprise me if MOST successful things failed at first.

See also: the Quooker story. There was a fantastic article about it but I can't find it anywhere, highly frustrating.

This is silly. What is the great idea? A way to quickly connect and disconnect things?

Zippers may have failed early on. But that is going to be more about difficulty of making them than the idea failing. This is closer to saying computers failed see first because the machines of Babbage fight factually do anything useful.

But that they failed is what is interesting. They look so obvious and so simple and yet if you look at them closely they are super clever.

I have never thought they were simple to the point of obvious. In large because I can't fix many when they break. So, to that point, I'd imagine most attempts at zippers fail.

> This is silly. What is the great idea? A way to quickly connect and disconnect things?

Yes …?

My point is that if you think the idea was the zipper, you are limiting what you are looking at. Even buttons used to be more rare.

Zippers require fairly precise machinery. It is not surprising that they are a modern commodity.

Many great ideas fail at first, and for a long time, because they’re massively ahead of their time. The helicopter, airplane, submarine, gun, and many more are fine examples. The submarine though has literally hundreds (or thousands if you stretch the definition) of years of abject failure before about a hundred years of resounding success.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_submarines

That’s a long time to be essentially sending people to a watery grave (with a few limited successes) before materials and engineering technology caught up to the vision of submersibles.

I would go and say that for most innovative things, the invention and the implementation are almost always 2 different phases (sometimes years or even decades apart).

Sometimes the technology for implementation is not there and sometimes people have a hard time grasping what they’re looking at, even if an implementation is done.

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