Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Zippers

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writer Dan Hopper (Ranker, The New Yorker) and actor/comedian Benny Wayne Sully ('NDND' on YouTube, 'My First Native American Boyfriend' short) for a look at why zippers are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Zippers. Known for being toothy. Famous for being zippy. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why zippers are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by Dan Hopper and Benny Wayne Sully, two wonderful returning guests. Dan Hopper is an old friend going back to our days at collegehumor.com. I used to work at College Humor and a sister said of theirs and things like that. Today, Dan is a managing editor at Ranker. He's also a comedy writer who's written for everything from College Humor to The New Yorker to The Washington Post.

And he's guested on this show about everything from hockey pucks to the U.S. Forest Service. Benny Wayne Sully guested on the episode of this show about Junk Mail. He's also a wonderful comedian and actor. Benny's part of a team behind NDND, which is a YouTube channel where they do tabletop role-playing games and all the performers are Native. Benny also stars in a short film called My First Native American Boyfriend that is in film festivals right now. And that's written and directed by other friend of the show, Joey Clift. And also, I'm going to put in links as soon as I have them. Benny is going to be in a play in New York City

this fall, like coming up very soon. The play is called Peerless. It's described as a darkly comedic twist on Shakespeare's Macbeth set in the cutthroat world of elite college admissions. So dark comedy stage play in New York City. If you're going to be at all in the city and want to see some theater, check out Benny Wayne Sully in Peerless. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples, acknowledge Dan recorded this on the traditional land of the Lenape people, acknowledge Benny recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and K'iche' and Chumash and Fernandinho-Taraviam peoples. And acknowledge

that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about zippers, which is a perfect topic for this podcast. Also a patron chosen topic. Thank you to Rex Coker for suggesting that. Also, thank you to Ren Callahan for suggesting that and to everybody who voted for it. Only other thing to say before we start, and this might sound a little random, but it's not. I want to say hello and I want to say thank you to every SifPod listener and supporter in Sweden, the country of Sweden. Thank you very much for being here.

Making this episode about zippers, for reasons that will make sense later, got me interested in the Swedish listenership of the podcast. Sweden is the number 10 country in the entire world for downloads of this podcast. So pretty high up the list. And also, you know, huge thank you to Linus. Thank you to other people who back this show at SifPod.fun and do it from Sweden who do it in Krona. There will be like jokes and bits about Sweden on this episode. That's mainly because Sweden has a surprisingly central role in the stories of Zippers. And they're not the only country here too. Japan pops up a lot. The United States pops up a lot. You know, this is a global item and I can't wait to talk about it.

So please sit back or curl up in a ball with your favorite zip up hoodie swaddling you all around yourself. A little cozy vacation. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Dan Hopper and Benny Wayne Sully. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Dan, Benny, it is so good to have you both. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start, but how do you feel about zippers?

I have like a pretty decent relationship with them, but I feel like after a couple years of only wearing comfy pants, you know, I feel like most of my pants now don't have zippers. Even like a lot of my formal ones they're just like stitched in and it's just a button situation or just like a drawstring yeah but i have like this excitement about zippers because there was this ride at my yearly county fair called the zipper right yeah and the zipper was the one where you would sit in it and you would rock back and forth trying to just do perpetual flips and we'd get yelled at by the guy who's like hey stop flipping in there and now like thinking back like he probably knew that that ride was unsafe and was like they're gonna undo all the screws in this mechanism the whole point is to flip what that

doesn't make any sense the whole point is to flip this dude would That doesn't make any sense. The whole point is to flip. This dude would scream at us from like, we'd be in the top, just like flipping as much as possible. And we could hear him screaming, like, stop flipping. Um, it was great. Uh, but yeah, I, I liked that ride because I think that there was the whole thing where it was, I was always too short to ride it. whole thing where it was i was always too short to ride it um and then one year i could ride it and i was like yeah but then i was like oh this isn't as good as gravitron uh but yeah that's just a little that's just a little county fair uh some people listening to this are like yeah gravitron is better he's right i just want to know like what county it probably travels but what county where is this johnson county indiana baby nice i think i think the zipper is one of those standard rides because i remember they had it at the boardwalk in ocean city maryland and my brother and i no one ever went on it because i guess it was like it's like so like debilitating you know you come off and if you're an adult you like go on and it just like throws off your equilibrium for the rest of your life basically yeah but my brother and i you know we were like 10 and 14 or

you know 12 and 8 or something i forget uh so we just like went on again and again and again like five six times in a row flipping around it's awesome it's like it's it's the best there's there's two there's like it's two wheels that hook onto cars but the cars are like hooked on loosely so they swing around. And then the wheels spin, and then the whole thing spins in the opposite direction. So you just keep flipping forwards, backwards the whole time. If I went on it now, I would absolutely die. I wouldn't be able to walk a straight line the rest of my life.

We should all find a zipper and try it. And try to ride it together. And just see who lasts the longest. I also I also like the idea that this travels from county to county and it's just the same employee watching the rules get violated nationwide. That's actually, you know, there's a very good chance that it is the same ride and they just deconstruct it and move it to the next place. Yeah. All right. Let's see if the people in this move it to the next place. Yeah. Alright, let's see if the people in this Iowa State Fair try flipping it. No! Oh! It's just every

it's like newly appalled in every zip code. Like can someone just go and enjoy it in a straight line? Just ride it like a Ferris wheel. It's just a funky Ferris wheel. And then like some pundits like Americans

have never been more divided. And then that guy is the counterpoint. Like we're all the same. This country is so bonded. Why are there six anti-flipping op-ed writers on the New York Times staff? There's only like 10 of them total. The new Brett Stevens

op-ed is scathing who would they represent no one's oh yeah and dan i was about to ask how are you with uh the regular old zipper yeah when i saw the topic i i was trying to think of my relationship i feel like mostly in the modern like nowadays the only time i ever think of zippers is when they break, right? You just completely take them for granted. It's either this like weird inconvenience or it works fine and you never think about it. The only interesting memory I could think of zipper related, besides the ride, the zipper, that didn't even cross my mind.

I can't believe you brought that up because I love that ride. That ride was a life-changing experience for me i still cannot walk straight yeah yeah i i remember like when i was a little kid remember i i like when you're a kid you have like three pairs of pants or something i like i don't know i like three or four pairs of pants total that i just wear every day as a kid and i think like two of them were jeans with zippers and two had like buttons. And I just did not wear the ones with buttons. Because I was like a little kid.

I was just like, I can't figure this out. Like you have to, the buttons you have to like slide into the other one, not the snap buttons. It's like, I'm like, this is, zipper, I give up. I was like, I have no time for buttons. I got to go, you know, play dragon, dragon warrior two or something. Something I just thought of is in the past,

like couple of years while I've had long hair, um, for the listeners, my hair goes like past my shoulders right now. I haven't worn any like zip up hoodies because I had one instance where I wasn't thinking and I zipped up a hoodie and I had a bunch of hair get caught in it. That's that's not a fun experience.

Like there's an inherent danger to zippers. I feel it makes them exciting in a way. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a jagged series of metal teeth that were just like, I'm really glad this is on my pants. That makes sense. It's the perfect like leather jacket accent, you know?

There's no more of a really cool vibe than the leather jacket and the zipper combo. A leather jacket with a bunch of zippers, like even on the pockets. Across the street when you see that coming at you. across the street when you see that coming at you i i can't i i can't lie and say that i have considered like the alluring danger of zippers as like part of the draw to them it's not like you're like promoting a horror movie on like a talk show or you're like you know we love the danger or something it's like you're promoting your like ski jacket it might get caught in your hair. We all share that fear as humans.

That's what draws us to things with zippers on them. Buy this light corduroy chore coat for the zipper. Man, now I wish zippers were, like, one of those things where it's like witches. We're, like, back to Puritan, New England. They've been afraid of the zip. That would be great. That's not a thing.

Like you believed like zipping it from bottom to top, like sealed your fate or something. Cause it's some like obscure Bible passage. Like, and then later they're like, Oh, that wasn't in the Bible at all. That was added in some edition that some King was like,

ah, I was mad at this Duke. And so I just threw this in the bible you know it's like it's just in there for like 400 years when when we said it was thou shalt not zipper big mistranslation it's actually an anti-murder passage so uh yeah that was actually that was actually george who works over at the fair he was tired of people flipping on his ride, and so he made his own commandment. Written in the margins, like, way later. It's like, that's not, I don't think that's. I think that's a metaphor. There is one Bible that you can just write in. It's like, no one write in this, or else it becomes the Bible.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, look at this. Who wrote this and read? This isn't this in red this isn't the but this isn't the bible there's the master copy gotcha yeah the pope just fratted on everybody like fess up which fun fact i don't know if you guys know this but to open that copy you have to unzip the binding yeah would it be built like a trapper keeper? Like it's got a zipper around the outside like the Pope's carrying it from class to class. And it has the dividers.

Jesus and some dolphins flying through space. It's like the logo. It's a holographic cover and if you scratch it, it makes really cool noises. Y'all might be turning me like really religious it sounds pretty good yeah the only other zipper thing i thought of too was uh the

scene and there's something about mary yeah where he gets a zipper cut at the beginning i wasn't gonna bring it up but i saw that scene as a kid and was that kind of added to that inherent danger that scene and the situation will be in the bonus show so we'll talk about that later cool okay and then in the meantime we get into the stats and numbers about this topic because on every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics and this week that's in a segment called cold hard facts math done for you some things are learned better baby with numbers chewed transition transition and i think it's gonna be a list of stats introduced by a song that's wacky and bad submitted to gmail or to at sif pod zero zero all right that name was submitted by ben

burris thank you very much ben and uh we have a new name for this segment every week like i sang it's at sif pod on twitter or sif pod at gmail.com i was waiting on you to sing out and i have a new name for this segment every week like I sang it's at SifPod on Twitter or SifPod at gmail.com I was waiting on you to sing out and I'm a zipper man oh the song's about stats not zippers you're right I'm a numbers man

I just can't believe I mean you guys can't see what we're looking at but I just can't believe Alex got Elton John to come onto the podcast to sing that I mean what a what a moment that was to watch the actual guy himself i mean you could tell from the voice that was him it's just like it's just incredible i got chills thank you yeah i still have goosebumps i'm glad i'm glad he and dua lipa could be here so i could use the bathroom for a bit that was was great. What a good break. And it was nice of him to do, you know, 13 takes so we could get like a good one.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you get what you pay for with those cameos. Yeah. So weirdly, the first number is musical. So we'll get into it. The first number is 1971. So we'll get into it. The first number is 1971. The year 1971. That's the year when the band the Rolling Stones put out an album cover with a working zipper on the front.

If people know the album Sticky Fingers released 1971, like the original album pressings of that, the cover had like an entire actual zipper on the front of the jeans i do know it but i had the cd and it doesn't do it's just a photo of a zipper that's why vinyl's coming back and cds are going away i i had the files from someone else in the freshman dorm floor at college so yeah i did not receive a zipper with that i in college i took a class that was the history of rock music and it was mainly focused on like the 60s and my professor he had this album oh with the working zipper yeah he had the original pressing he also had a bunch of letters that he sent to the beatles when he was like eight and it was adorable. But yeah, he had this actual thing because I remember him talking about the fact that it had a zipper component. collaboration between an album cover designer named Craig Braun and the artist Andy Warhol.

So Andy Warhol worked on this. And then apparently with the album, you could pull the zipper up and down. And then when you pulled it down, you could see another picture inside of Mick Jagger's underwear. Was there like tactile underwear, like fabric on it? I thought. Oh, that I don't know I'm not sure might be confusing at the time I actually unzip Mick Jagger's pants yeah that's a boring story I don't want to get into that yeah it's like yeah people are like move on

yeah yeah talk about this the fair rides again we want to hear more about Johnson County, Indiana. Also, I have to give a shout out to Andy Warhol from my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. Oh. Yeah. And he,

his idea here, it turned out to be very impractical. This is like a real metal zipper, and so it often damaged the vinyl, especially if there was a stack of copies like getting shipped together in a big pile and squished down and according to far out magazine the zippers specifically destroyed the first part of the song brown sugar so if you got the album that's what you lose we are rescinding the the shout out to Andy now. I've never been more embarrassed to be.

I mean, what an inefficient process. Scratch that from the episode. Yeah. Well, he did. He moved to New York very young, okay? I barely even lived in Pittsburgh. Yeah. Right.

We don't blame him. His ideas in Pittsburgh were great. This was a New York idea. Yeah. Yeah. It sticks. Everybody knows that Andy Warhol's New York era was New York idea. Yeah. Everybody knows that Andy Warhol's New York era was his

lowest point. Yeah. Yeah, he was working at some factory, as I understand it. Not even an artist, right? Like, forget it. Yeah. And next number here, oddly, also ties into that sad song because it's about space the next number is six months and six months is the amount of time that was the shelf life of the zippers on space suits for the apollo missions apparently within six months of

manufacture they were considered too degraded to be airtight and be used in space anymore. Wow. I didn't even realize that a zipper could be airtight necessarily, but I guess that makes sense. That's, that's crazy. Yeah. The thing is it's like a regular zipper is not airtight and they had to build super special zipper systems for these spacesuits and the smithsonian air and space museum has online stuff about it and they have pictures of one from apollo 14. what it is is two entire sets of brass metal zippers and a layer of rubber in between and then also once an astronaut like put on their helmet pressurized the suit that made the rubber expand and fill any little cracks in the zipper area.

So like your regular jacket or whatever is not airtight. It's this extremely special thing. And then also apparently rubber reacts poorly to copper, which is one of the ingredients in the brass of the zippers. And so there's basically a bad chemical reaction going on within this zipper system all the time and that's why they wore out after six months i'm curious about like the testing of that i feel like there'd be so much trepidation about like oh okay good luck like we'll it's been seven months

we're gonna see this is the cutoff uh zipper alert like just huge just giant like they're all looking at it just one huge alarm for just specifically zipper related and there's just a room of like 200 smoking guys with skinny ties like reacting to it houston we have a problem looking at this photo because it's the double layer of zippers yeah it reminds me of like you know how there's like with um like with sleeping bags you'll have a zipper with uh an internal component so that you can't get locked in your sleeping bag oh yeah i feel like those ones were always like a lower quality of some sort or it was it would be like where you could zip it from two different directions or something and and they'd have to

meet in the middle i'm now i'm mad about zippers yeah because i'm thinking that all the sleeping bags i ever had that just like had poor quality zippers what we needed was a double layer of brass, airtight, rubber insulation, space. I've never been an active enough person to have used so many sleeping bags that I like wore out the zipper. I was in the Boy Scouts and my family never bought nice sleeping bags. Oh, OK. We only had the low, low quality ones. Whatever you could find um at walmart or ideally on the street uh was kind of what i'd be shipped off to camp in with zipper quality i'm

thinking of something you said dan where like zippers are really in the background of our lives and i feel like i've never actually known the quality of a zipper i have i just don't think about it and then at some point it works funny or breaks. And then I think it's bad. Like that's my entire knowledge of zipper quality. It has to exist in the background, but I think that by the end of this episode, we'll come to find that zippers themselves are secretly incredibly

fascinating. Stop trying to get in the trailer. Yes. I always try to fit the episode name benny got it fair and square benny got it fair and square okay all right i i resist having to say secretly incredibly fascinating every time i do an episode i also resist i know when i listen to this podcast every time you say a number you're just like our first number is 7.2 being like whoa just like way before you explain what it even it could possibly

be just being like amazed by any like fact that's a good not even Not even a fact, just a number. Yeah. I used to be at the gym and, like, listening to a comedy podcast and be self-conscious about laughing. I hope people are self-conscious about being, like, 7.2 out loud, like, with no context. That would bring me a lot of joy. 1971? Everyone's just, like, looking at them as they binge press. That guy must be listening to the secretly incredibly fascinating podcast without a minute. He just said 7.2 out loud while running on the treadmill. No context.

That's our secret handshake for all the fans is just say 7.2 to each other with a lot of meaning. Yeah. Yeah. Man, I hate to be departing the numbers now, but there's one more number brings us into the first takeaway. And the number is 1917. Whoa! Perfect. And 1917 is the year when an engineer named Gideon Sundback got a U.S. patent for what he called a separable

fastener, and that's the start of the modern zipper. That brings us into takeaway number one. Modern zippers are partially the result of a love story. Between the two halves of the pants. Oh. this is like the two halves of the pants oh it's it's so apropos yeah that a zipper something that combines two uh two different things into one is is uh uh from a love story oh the teeth just robio and julietting all the time yeah great yeah it's just hugging that's all it is the zipper's just just some two two pieces of metal just hugging just a big hug yeah and this uh this is like a little bit of a lengthy takeaway but it's it's really where zippers came from as

technology and it gets surprisingly human at the end it comes from partly two people falling in love which is very nice. And there's two key sources for this. One of them really enjoyed finding out that there is an entire history book all about zippers. It's called Zipper and Exploration and Novelty. It's by historian Robert Friedel of the University of Maryland. And it's great. It's really fun. The other source is a piece for JSTOR Daily by Cynthia Green. But there were a few people involved in the invention of zippers. It's not just one person. The key one who made them functional and popular was the engineer Gideon Sundback, who lived 1880 to 1954.

And then there were also a couple people before him. And one of them is the inventor of the lockstitch sewing machine. The main modern sewing machine inventor's name was Elias Howe Jr. He patented the sewing machine in 1846 and then five years later filed a patent for what's considered like the first general zipper. Like the first thing that is not a modern zipper, but is broadly the idea. that is not a modern zipper, but is broadly the idea. I'm going to have a few pictures of patents linked in the episode description and stuff, because you can see weird kind of zippers from before we had them,

and one of them is Elias House. Interesting. And so prior to zippers, was it just buttons and tie-offs, tying threads or something? Yeah, a lot of pinning, a lot of buttons, a lot of tying, yeah. There were other ways to do stuff. But I would not want to live in a world without zippers. They're really handy. It's really great.

Yeah, save us so much time. Centuries of people being like, the Lord will keep my pants together. And you just have to have faith. It's kind of sacrilegious to not. So the way you described it, is it like a drawstring or like a knapsack, like tightening it, like that kind of thing?

I'm having trouble picturing it. Yeah, it's almost like if you pulled a drawstring to combine the teeth of a zipper. But the other thing about this is this patent from how was only ever a diagram he never like built it or pursued it he was mostly busy making a bunch of money selling sewing machines and fighting over sewing machine patents so he he gets credit for this and had very little influence on it gotcha so who took it around with it yeah and then the other inventor who who really sets the stage for this his name is whitcomb l judson and i know this is another long old name but whitcomb l judson uh in 1893 he gets a patent for what he calls a clasp locker or

unlocker for shoes and this will be the other patent picture we have linked. The main innovation he had was a sliding fastener, like the part that we pull up and down on a zipper. But he had a sliding fastener operating a set of hooks and little eyelets, those little holes that a hook goes into with metal around it. So it's still not really a modern zipper but it's a lot closer and he thought that was a way to fasten shoes so yeah so zippers are really more recent than i mean i guess i would have guessed they were kind of recent but they're really recent right it's like yeah the good ones are about 100 years old they'll come in like the

in 1917 there and after yeah wow was it like a huge luxury when it first came out or is it you know you know is it like like it's a good question had like a zipper you know like so like someone has a zipper and they're like oh you're you're shooting above the waist here yeah it's just's just like this sign of extreme wealth. Oh, did you see Mary across the street has zippers on her shoes? Boy, have they done well. These aristocrats

making it a point to not zip up their pants after they use the bathroom until they come out into the parlor and then they're like, oh, what was that? Oh, no problem.

Yeah, my pants have zippers. The proletariat is all striking because their bosses have zippers, but they don't have that luxury. We must unzip their coffers and spread the wealth. A political cartoon of like JP Morgan's fly, fly like unzip it unzip it you know stupid yeah they uh the zipper it a lot of it comes down to like skilled machining and mechanical engineering basically like making the parts well enough this is never really like a luxury item it's just something that takes a lot of time to become popular mainly because judson especially went all in on trying to make a whole company of this like he patents it in 1893 he's in chicago so he exhibits it at the columbian exposition of 1893 in chic, and then proceeds to found the Universal Fastener Company.

But his entire idea for it is a sliding fastener with a bunch of weird hooks and eyelets. And so it doesn't work very good. And the company struggles. The company changes names and changes home cities repeatedly. It takes them from 1893 all the way until 1905 to sell their first product. They sell a fastener for women's clothing 12 years after they start being a business. And so into the 1900s, kind of no one is excited about zippers, even though we've had the idea. Gosh, I cannot imagine. You said 1893 to 1905?

Yeah, so 12 years yeah can you imagine just sitting on an idea for 12 years and being able to like somehow exist and be like yeah we haven't launched a product yet but we got a really good idea on the same like profitability timeline as every new tech company yeah it's like yeah like i got an idea we're not gonna make a single dollar for 13 years oh everyone's investing okay cool and a lot of those companies are like amazon and this was like a chicago zipper company that's just not gonna make that much money man right come on i am curious about when it first came out it was obviously an item that made life a little easier for sure uh in a few ways marginally at least but i wonder if it was like cost effective if it was cheaper than the alternatives at the time oh because i'm sure that it is now or,

or it is at least cheap enough that we're still using zippers. But I wonder if from the, from the onset, if there was, you know, they, they probably had to have specialized machinery and, and,

and stuff to be able to make these. And I wonder how profitable it was or if it was like oh yeah pants are cheaper or if they're more expensive with a zipper yeah because yeah that's a great question because it it does seem like we'll get to in a sec like the leap of good engineering just to make zippers work better fundamentally was the key thing because then once they were selling once people were into them they were an immediate hit according to atlas obscura this the same company spoiler they will become a major zipper manufacturer but they made a jump from selling a few thousand money belts with zippers on them in 1917 to in 1930 just 13 years later selling 20 million zippers a year wow they went from like a few thousand products to 20 million basically as soon as people said okay now i like zippers great like

that that was really just the the key thing they needed to happen but i yeah i never get the sense they were like only a luxury product or like some kind of cadillac that you had to be wealthy to get yeah i mean looking at the photos of the patent it looks more like a torture device than anything that would be a luxury component to clothing was there like a watershed like pop culture moment where it's like boxer jack johnson shows off his zipper and it like became a phenomenon or something actually that would probably make people riot but yeah if a boxer's an old-timey boxer's wearing like a a large zipper from the bottom of his boxing trunks all the way up that's just dangerous at that point but yeah and again that inherent zipper danger you know he's going to get hit below the belt. I'll tell you what, that'll cut up your gloves.

Yeah. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club

with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. It's not a pop culture moment. We'll get to that in the next takeaway, though. Like, there is a spark for it. But this mechanical engineering jump, it happens because of this guy, Gideon Sundback, who I talked about at the start of the takeaway. And he was a highly trained mechanical and electric engineer. And he was from Sweden. He trains in Sweden, trains in Germany. He trains in Sweden, trains in Germany, and he's basically the early 1900s version of a highly sought-after coder,

or like all the tech companies want to hire this engineer kind of person. And then in 1905, he immigrates to the U.S. and goes straight to his new job in Pittsburgh. Hey, Pittsburgh! Hey, hey! At the Westinghouse Company, which was the equivalent of like a big tech company in 1905. And then what happens is he is at Westinghouse. They're paying him well. They're promoting him.

He's basically just set for a comfortable life in this industry. And then all of a sudden, Sundback quits his job. And he quits to go work at that weird zipper company that has now changed names and locations enough times that it's called the Automatic Hook and Eye Company in Hoboken, New Jersey. And according to historian Robert Friedel's book, the main reason Sunback did that is because he fell in love with the daughter of the plant manager at that company whoa like that was the whole reason he basically quit like a top tech job to go work at this weird failing startup i thought you're gonna say fell in love with the zipper like he was oh that was the love story not like love you know not like sexual desire love just like that he was like fascinated as an engineer about it i mean maybe that engineering marvel yeah that's right yeah he was just he had a lot of passion about zippers uh-huh

just that noise coming from his office all the time like oh yeah he's in there that's sweet sweet zip did they get together how did did it end? They did. And so, yeah, it was this thing. It was also partly a Swedish immigrant thing. The plant manager of Automatic Hook and I was a Swedish immigrant named Peter Aronson. Sunback is a Swedish immigrant and also an engineering guy. And Aronson invites him to visit the company basically as a, like, we're theedish engineers we both know why don't we like hang out and then when sunback visits he meets aronson's daughter alvira and according to him he fell in love with her pursued her from afar and then left westinghouse to be closer to her by

working at this sliding fastener company they get married 1909, and then also Sundback is a way better engineer than anybody they had and radically improves the tech. He switches them from hooks and eyelets to interlocking metal teeth like we're used to. And by 1917, they had an awesome product, and zippers become popular. What a beautiful mutual relationship he had with hook and i you know he was able to get a a wonderful life partner and they were able to get a product that has uh stood the test of time

exactly beautiful two love stories right there those two in america with zippers yeah we're one of the teeth we're one of the teeth we're all just teeth in a one big love story i feel like so many of these product stories it's like thomas edison tried it 1000 times grimly and then he finished it and and this one is like human like there's there's like Thomas Edison tried it 1000 times grimly and then he finished it. And this one is like human. There's like a thing going on in the background. I like it so much. I also just love that this guy just shows up and he's like, hey, we're changing the product.

Like, I'm not here because of zippers. I'm here because of Elvira. But your product's garbage, guys. And I'm going to completely change the functionality of it. And then they saw it and they were like, Gideon's right.

It's like that job interview thing where you want to be at least a little enthusiastic about what they do. He just went in there like, you guys are the worst. I'm better than all of you. I'm going to fix it. Bring me in. Yeah.

But he did it with the Swedish accent and they were like, he's endearing. It's true. It's like, I'm sorry, my English is not so good. Your product is garbage.

Am I saying, is that correct? It's just an absolute piece of crap that must be thrown away and changed so fundamentally you have to change the name of your company. Okay, Gideon, your English is actually really good. You knew fundamentally. That is also true that they actually do change the company name once he improves it because it's not hooks and eyes anymore. Yeah, they changed the name to Talon and it became like to this day a big zipper manufacturer yeah talon like t-a-l-o-n yeah like a bird talon yeah oh that's so cool that's so much

cooler it's it also rules yeah see that's the zippers and the leather jackets yeah talon probably makes all leather jacket zippers. I'm not a marketing person, but also maybe change the name to this much cooler name. I don't want to do a Swedish accent. It's like half German. I'm not even going to attempt because what you did was perfect. I had a Swedish roommate for one month. I just tried to imitate that guy.

Oh, nice. Yeah. mate for one month that's all i just try to imitate that guy oh nice i uh i was watching this uh very real cooking show the other day where they had a swedish chef and what he did is he chased a puppet chicken with a big uh big knife actually it was a very real cooking show i learned a lot oh man it's not the puppets yeah that was actually that was the new Hulu show The Bear yeah I've seen it I you know I've worked in a lot of kitchens so I was triggered at that episode

I couldn't watch anymore it's just a bit too real for me yeah it seems like dramatic but you know if you've worked in a restaurant you'll get it you'll understand that character immediately we've all worked for that that swedish chef swedish chef chasing around puppets yeah i the bear's great and also i feel like a lot of the discourse around it is how the main guy is hot and i really wish all of that was about the swedish chef puppet

like oh he's so hot oh i can't believe it that mustache oh crazy it does seem like i could fix him i feel like fix it by teaching him words yeah i feel like you know five years ago twitter was like was like obsessed with just finding the weirdest people hot right that was like 2017 twitter would be like, anyone else think the Swedish chef, like, low-key wants to bang? You know, it's like... They're like, this dude definitely eats cigarettes, but I'm into it.

Smash me with a frying pan, Mr. Chef. And you're like, what? And there's like 1,200 retweets on it. You're like, you all think this? Like, what the hell? I'd let him drop a cast iron skillet on my foot. Brand me with your all clad. This was my sexual awakening when I was 12 and all these people are agreeing.

You're like, what? Yeah. It's just very real uh well uh let's get into another main takeaway here and it kind of continues the story takeaway number two the name zipper comes from the sound of a zipper that's how it came about we love an onomatopoeia exactly and this also covers dan's great question of like was there a moment that made zippers huge because it turns out that when gideon sunback finishes this like better sliding fastener it still is not called a zipper yet but they patent

that 1917 and then they get a contract to make money belts for the u.s navy because 1917 the u.s had just joined world war one so they're just ordering stuff for all these new troops and they give american sailors a money belt with a sliding fastener those guys really like it and then from there they spread the word and what's now called the hookless fastener company and will be called talon gets a bunch of contracts for a bunch of fasteners for a bunch of stuff yeah i'm this was kind of coming out at the perfect time because it was right before world war one and i'm assuming that the zipper not changed like the the war industry or anything but like they probably were used for a lot of what do you call uh

the the outfits they wear they're probably uniforms for a lot of war costumes fighties yeah yeah they're little they're little fight wear yeah combat romper sure yeah sure yeah yeah yeah Yeah, combat romper. Sure. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah. Combat romper. But it's true. That was the Swedish guy coming through. He was like, oh, yes, this combat romper will be the perfect thing for your fighters. Well, and Talon, because that's exactly right. Like military uses, you know, one army could say zippers for this, zippers for that.

And so they really spread. But Talon and other companies, and we'll talk a little later about the current biggest zipper company, but they were all just calling them sliding fasteners or other names they could think of. or other names they could think of. And according to JSTOR Daily, we did already have the word zip that entered English in the mid-1800s, and it meant to move rapidly, which is still what it means today, like zip, you know. But in 1923, the B.F. Goodrich Company, which is today most famous for, like, tires, you know, but they were a rubber goods company back then,

and they decided to incorporate zippers into some of their rubber boots and the boots had the brand name mystics which was not really selling very well and then they tried the new name of zipper boots because and they specifically picked that name both for the like zip meaning of moving quickly and footwear but also because they heard the sound that the of moving quickly and footwear but also because they heard the sound that the fastener made and they said hey this sounds like zip that's very clever incredibly yeah so it's kind of like a xerox or q-tip situation where it started as like the name of a product but then that kind of began to encapsulate the entire mechanism.

Exactly. Yeah. Gotcha. I mean, it's just a good name. Yeah, that's a great name. They nailed it. They did good, yeah. Zipping around in my zipper boots.

Yeah, it just feels good. Like BF Goodrich is still a company. That probably helped. It worked. Immediately, people were like, finally finally there's a name for these sliding fasteners that we're all getting into in the 1920s yeah because i feel like nobody wanted to be like oh let me just uh fasten my hook and i fastener no yeah it's lame it's pretty lame yeah yeah we i'd cancel plans with them they're called zippers now, Grandpa. Yeah.

It's like the intense commercial then, but it's still in the old Americana, like Norman Rockwell ad copy. But that was extreme then? Yeah. Yeah, and to the modern day, there's one last other quick takeaway for the main episode. Here we go. Takeaway number three.

Most modern zippers have the letters YKK stamped on them because that's a Japanese brand name. And I think some people might know this. Also, you at home, not while you're driving or whatever, but you can check your zippers. A lot of them might have the letters YKK stamped onto them. And it turns out that's because after Talon, after these other zipper companies came along, a competing company called YKK from Japan took over the industry. Wow. Oh my God, Alex. I just looked down at my zipper.

You know what's on it? YKK? out of my brain surprise i've never given that a thought in my entire life until this second it's wild that they brand it yeah i mean it makes sense you know get that credit where it's due but it's also like nobody's noticing that. Right. But it's crazy that like a pair of Levi's already has like the tag and the red tag and all the like iconic stuff. But then the zipper itself has a little, the zipper itself I'd say is secretly incredibly fascinating because it has this. You're already in the trailer pal hey let's just extended trailer put it in twice i'm into it more trailer yeah sweet uh little little monogram though that's

really interesting it's also interesting that it's just every apparel company referring to this like third-party zipper company to make their zippers like everyone's like yeah they they figured it out i'm not gonna even try like it's not more efficient for a huge clothing company to like make their own zippers or use something else or everyone's just like i can't i don't know how the thing works the teeth it's so complicated just buy them from ykk ykk's got it on lock or should i say got it on zip? Hey, correct. Thank you. Yeah, that expression. Yeah, this isn't universal to every zipper,

but you at home, if you look at more than a few, this company, the full name is Yoshida Kogyo Kabushi Kigaisha. And Yoshida Kogyo Kabushi Kigaisha makes the majority of zippers in the world today. By the 1970s, they were making a quarter of all of them, and then it grew to most of them. So they took over. Just the giant zippers so they could fit the whole company name on it. I think we get short shorten this a little bit. Giant zipper

dangling below your shorts with the Japanese name vertically on it. We could probably do this a little better. Actually, they hired Gideon Sunback and that was his first note. Yeah. The giant zippers,

they're very nice i just a small suggestion shortened to ikk sounds like the beach a little bit i think that that the bonus episode should just be you talking in your gideon impression because i do think that that's wonderful just getting an idea so the the progression here is talon in the 1930s becomes a huge zipper company. And they're also like sort of creating more market for zippers. Zippers were novel then. Like in 1937, there was an Esquire magazine article claiming that zippers had defeated buttons in what they called the Battle of the Fly.

Like for flies on pants. Like as recently as the 1930s, people were like, can you believe these zippers? Amazing. And so until somewhat recently, recent decades, there was this talent company was the main one. There was also a German one called Optalon. And then in the meantime, Tadao Yoshida of the town of Kurobe in Japan. Yoshida sets up his own company that's acronym YKK in 1934. They immediately just reverse engineered Talon's design and make their own Talon zippers in Japan.

Also, the company initially set up in Tokyo. That factory got destroyed in the firebombing of tokyo in world war ii then yoshida moves back home to kurobe just restarts the company and they just increasingly succeeded at making the best zippers the most popular zippers to the point where today they are most of them and then to people who have not heard this, just mysteriously a lot of the zippers on your things will say YKK. Wow. But it's because Yoshida Kogyo Kabushiki Geisha is the company that made it. That's what's going on.

Wow. Talon was like, hey, when you're bombing Tokyo, if you happen to hit the zipper factory, we would not complain. Gideon's making their war rompers and he's just like hey if you want this shipment you still want these boots yeah yeah there's some out of your way but you know send a few bombs uh out that way and and it's like you guys said like you would think a lot of companies would just make their own zippers in-house and i'm sure a few do but no there's been this like coke versus pepsi and then overwhelmingly one by one company

battle between zipper makers and ykk is so dominant that a few years ago they fought and lost an antitrust lawsuit in the European Union because the EU said, you guys are fully a monopoly. We need to, like, break you up a little bit. Wow. Y and K go your separate ways. Their response to the European Union I heard was they said, hey, zip it. And they were like, oh, you got us. Alright. Folks, that is the main

episode for this week. My thanks to Dan Hopper and to Benny Wayne Sully for being a trio with me. Sort of like that trio of letters, YKK, that might be on your zippers right now. Wow. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. E if you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic tackles kind of a comedy trope, kind of an urban legend, but

it turns out a real and rare thing. It is the reality and the myths of zipper injuries. And I mean in the there's something about Maryway. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than eight dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring zippers with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, modern zippers are partially the result of a love story. Takeaway number two, the name zipper comes from the sound of a zipper.

Takeaway number three, most modern zippers have the letters YKK stamped onto them because that's the dominant Japanese zipper brand. Plus more about NASA and the Rolling Stones and other rad stuff. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Visit Ranker.com to see Dan Hopper's work every day. Also going to link a couple other comedy writing pieces from him.

And he is at Dan Hopp on Twitter. That is Dan H-O-P-P. Dan Hopp on Twitter. He also has a separate Pittsburgh sports account that we talked about on the Hockey Pucks episode because he's very, very funny about Pittsburgh sports and also thoughtful about putting that in a separate account. Benny Wayne Sully, also on Twitter. He is at The Doofus, at T-H-E-D-O-O-P-H-U-S, The Doofus. Gonna have that linked, of course. You can also catch Benny on the NDND YouTube channel where they do tabletop role-playing games with an all-native cast. If you are at any film festivals coming up, look for the short My First Native American Boyfriend, starring Benny Wayne Sully, written and directed by Joey Clift.

And Hey, New York City. Hey, New York City, if you're here, like, September, October, November, there's an amazing off-Broadway show coming up. It's called Peerless. It's a darkly comedic take on Mac coming up. It's called Peerless. It's a darkly comedic take on Macbeth set in the world of college admissions, and that's going to be starring Benny Wayne Sully in New York City. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. And one big pleasure of making this show is finding out that an expert has written the

definitive nonfiction book entirely about a topic that is an episode topic, this week I learned that is a book called Zipper, an Exploration in Novelty, and that's written by historian Robert Friedel of the University of Maryland. Beyond that, leaned out all sorts of online sources from places like the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, JSTOR Daily, Vanity Fair, Atlas Obscura. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patronsza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.