Google’s zipper doodle celebrates 132nd birthday of Gideon Sundback

Updated on 24-Apr-2012

Google today celebrates what would have been 132nd birthday of Gideon Sundback, the inventor of zipper, with an innovative doodle on its home page. The Swedish-American electrical engineer is mainly known for the development of the fastening device that revolutionized the apparel industry.

Born on April 24, 1880, Sundback migrated to the U.S. from Sweden in 1905. Later, Sunback worked at the Universal Fastener Company in New Jersey. By 1909, Sunback became head designer.

Sunback had first come up with a zipper design in 1913 that featured oval scoops, interlocked by moving a slider. Sundback continued to work on his design and next year he came up with another version of zipper that was based interlocking teeth – the Hookless No. 2 – which also laid the foundation for modern-day metal zippers.

Did you know that the zipper in its initial days wasn’t called a zipper but was addressed as a ‘separable fastener’. B F Goodrich company which later used Sundback’s ‘separable fastener’ in its products named it  zipper. For more information about Sunback, head on to the Wikipedia link.

Today’s Google doodle is quite innovative, as you click on the doodle, the Google home page unzips to showcase a search engine result page on the Swedish-American engineer. The zipper runs through the middle of the Google logo. Check out the zipper doodle below:

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