Stuff You Should Know - Zippers: Humans’ Greatest Invention? No, But Still Good

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

The zipper may be the most unsung invention we humans have ever come up with. Prior to zippers, everyone walked around like idiots with nothing but buttons to hold their clothes together. The zipper changed all that. The zipper changed everything. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, everybody. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Tran, Drip, Drip, Drip Bryant over there.

Jerry's somewhere out in the ether, floating along in an alternate dimension of chaos and disorder, and this is stuff you should know. That's right, Inventor Series. Sure, inventors in this case, lots of inventors. First I wanna say, Chuck, I gotta fully prepare the studio, the little house studio here. There we go.

So I've just sprayed a couple of spritzes of mama brand grapefruit, tangerine, aromatherapy room spray, and I'm feeling energized and ready to go. Oh, good, that's very nice. That is some nice stuff, man. I need some of that in my basement. Oh, you should have loads of it.

I should, I do, I just don't have it down here. Where could somebody find it if they weren't me? I already know where to find it. Well, you gotta loveyourmama.com and support small businesses that sell soap when you need soap. Very nice, Chuck, very nice. And yes, I can attest this is some fine room spray.

And you're washing your hands a lot, so get some lotion, cause you're probably dry. I'm just using the room spray as everything. Oh yeah. Yeah, lotion, soap, what else? Lip balm? You know, essential oils, stuff like that, lip balm. All the good things to make you slippery.

So speaking of slippery, Chuck, you know something that's not really slippery when you use it correctly, a zipper. It's been a while as far as the segue goes, so give me a break. It's been a while. Yeah, I, Oh, oh, you just reminded me of something.

Hold on, hold on, I'm very sorry, I gotta do this. I'm so glad you reminded me though. So you sang that song, somehow it reminded me of Breakfast at Tiffany's, that song. Yeah, that song. That duo is friends with our buddy, Toby Halbrooks. Toby Halbrooks and his lovely wife, Anel,

just had their first baby. Oh, Toby had a baby? Yes. I love it. So congratulations to Toby and Anel. They have a cute little baby too. I've seen a picture of her and she is adorable, so congrats guys and way to go. That's amazing, I'm very happy for them.

Toby's a great guy. And I don't know if I met his wife, have I? I don't know. I don't think I have. Maybe it's South by Southwest. Maybe, that was a long time ago. It was a while back. Yeah.

I remember eating, drinking and eating Bloody Mary's with bacon and cheese and sort of, it was one of those places that had it all in the glass. Yeah, that was nice. At the Drexel Hotel, right? Yeah, it was a good day. Or Driscoll, Driscoll. Driscoll, that's right.

All of that from, it's been a while. So let's talk about buttons and then zippers. Okay, so I thought that this was a pretty cool intro if you ask me, because if you think about zippers, you think, well zippers, they're great. Who needs to think much about them? Well, you do, pal, because you are blessed to be living in an age where zippers exist.

Because it was not too long ago, about a hundred years, a little over a hundred years, that there weren't zippers. You had a button, basically, maybe some clasps, nothing that you were gonna be happy dealing with. And most of the time, for most of human history, it was a button that was our only option to connect two pieces of fabric and hold it in place.

Yeah. Which is more important than you would think, Chuck. The dumb, clumsy button has been around. I think the earliest button that we found comes from a settlement in the Indus Valley civilization, which is now modern-day Pakistan. And it was a curved shell. It's about 5,000 years old.

And buttons back then, this was sort of even pre-button hole. They were loops. If you've ever had one of those cool old school, well, some P-coats have the loops, some don't. But I'm kind of thinking of the loop and bone thing that some of these kind of corduroy coats have had. Or if you were a cape, you've probably encountered something like this.

Yeah, my cape definitely has a loop and bone. One of my capes. Say Pakistan, but like Sammy Davis, Jr. Pakistan, babe. Very nice, very nice. So the button from what I understand, though, from 5,000 years ago up to a little less than 1,000 years ago,

for the most part, it was just basically for showing off. Like, yeah, you could use it to clasp a couple pieces of material together or whatever. For the most part, it was an adornment. It was like jewelry. And it wasn't until I think the 13th century that buttons started to be taken seriously for the first time,

where you had the first button maker's guild formed in France in 1250. That was a big watershed moment in the history of buttons. Yeah, basically everyone was like, guys, we've had buttons for a long time. I think it's about time we start taking these things seriously. Yeah, it's been amateur hour bush league stuff up to this point.

Let's get serious about buttons. And they did. So they really stopped and thought, well, we can make this better. Forget that loop that you put things through and the button can just fall right back through. What if we make a hole in the actual fabric that we're trying to connect itself,

sew some edges around it and make what we'll eventually call a button hole? How about that? And this actually as simple as that is, just made clothing technology jump by light years. Yeah, that was a big deal because those loops can break off and often do. But sometimes they just dissolve in the sun.

Yeah, those buttonholes, they don't break. I guess if you were really hard on them, they could eventually split to the seam, but they were a lot better than those loops. And buttons, they were the thing. They were around for a long time. They were just sort of the way that you fastened two pieces of clothing together.

But at some point, someone was like, there's gotta be a better way. Like every great invention, not every great invention, but many great inventions were built on someone trying to do something in a better way. Yeah, because even when the button's working on all four cylinders, which is as many as it has, there's still some real flaws in it

and that the fabric that you're pulling together and holding together with the button might be held at the button point, but above and below that button, there's a big old hole and who knows what's sticking out of there? You know what I'm saying? Sure.

Buttons can also pop off. There's some problems with it and with those flaws, like you're saying, some people said there's gotta be a better way. And a progression of people started to kind of vibe on the same idea separately from what I understand. And the first of the bunch was a guy named Elias Howe, Jr. who in 1851 got himself a patent

for a automatic continuous clothing closure. That's right. That was what he called it, not exactly catchy. Yeah, so his idea was you sew some reinforcements to a couple of edges of material that you wanna, you know, join together in wedded union. And you connect them with all these clasps, a series of clasps,

but they are connected by a cord running or sliding, as he says in the patent, upon ribs. Not the best invention. And it didn't work that great because they were clasps. Like this was the predecessor of the zipper, to be sure. It was not on it like later inventors would be. No, but the idea of pulling on like a pole and moving like a mechanism across, you know,

two pieces of fabric and joining it together in its wake, that is clearly the foundation of zippers. Like this guy clearly laid the foundation and probably would be considered the father of the zipper, but he left everything just sitting there in his 1851 patent. He never pursued it. And most people think that the reason he didn't pursue is because he had bigger fish to fry

in the form of the modern sewing machine. He was also the inventor of the sewing machine. And he's like, I'm feeling a little more bullish about the sewing machine than the zipper to use collapsing economy type terms. That's right. So the father of the zipper is a man, or generally known as this man from Chicago

named Whitcomb Judson. That's a great name. This is in 1893, about 44 years after Hal had filed his patent and he marketed and sold, which meant, you know, he kind of owned it then, as a clasp locker or unlocker for shoes, which was interesting that he was that narrow in his design. I think, I don't know if it was at the time,

I think now you try and go as broad as you can with patents, but back then he was like, this thing works great for shoes and shoes are kind of a pain to put on. So that's what we're gonna use them for. Yeah, I mean, he was like, this is a real problem because again, we have buttons mostly for shoes. And, you know, because shoes were fairly form fitting, you needed a lot of buttons per inch in a row

to really hold these two pieces of fabric together, one flap over another. So these buttons were small and they were sewn close together. So close, in fact, that they invented another invention called a button, button hook. Yeah. And it was like a little handheld harpoon,

a mini harpoon with the hook on the end, and you would push it through the button hole and pull the button out with it. And you do this like eight, 10,000 times per shoe. And that was how you put shoes on. So, I mean, I'm sure people just put shoes on once when they were a grown adult and just didn't take them off until they were buried.

You know? Yeah. So he was trying to solve the solution with a pole that you could just kind of do the same thing with. And he really took Elias' house. And again, I'm not sure if it was because he was familiar with the patent or not.

But he took that and basically said, this is worth pursuing. This is important stuff here. Yeah, so like many great inventors, he got together with a business person, a man named Colonel Lewis Walker, because a lot of times inventors like to toil away in the shop and tinker with things,

and they need like a real business brain to kind of run the show. Why is it always a Colonel though? Why not like a major or a general? Is it always a Colonel? Yeah, Colonel Tom Parker. Colonel Sanders. Colonel Sanders.

Colonel Bruce Springsteen. Colonel Klink. Always a Colonel. Colonel Klink. So he got together with Walker, Colonel Walker, and launched the Universal Fastener Company to manufacture and sell the Judson security fastener. Very clever there, the letter C dash security fastener. Right.

And like so many huge products were debuted at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and was a huge hit, except that it wasn't. No, and I have to say, admittedly, it took me at least twice to realize it wasn't Cucuriti. Really? Yeah, it wasn't the first time. All right.

But so in that 1893 World's Fair, they, when they debuted it, this is, have you ever read Devil in the White City? I know I've asked you before, we still have it. Man, you're really gonna like it, Chuck. But anyway, it was that World's Fair. God, the guy does such a great job of describing that, that World's Fair and like the importance of it.

Far as I know, he doesn't mention zippers, but he may, because he did some pretty good research, obviously, but the whole thing was a flop for a couple of reasons. They were really unreliable at the time and they were really expensive. And when you looked really closely at them, they still weren't what you'd recognize as zippers.

They had little clasp, it was a little clasp hook combo. And when you dragged this, this mechanism up, the clasps were pulled toward one another and hooked. When you pulled it down, they would be unhooked. You also could just do the whole thing by hand. But again, it was still like this clearly the foundation for zippers, but it wasn't quite right. Luckily, Whitcomb Judson didn't give up.

Instead, he hired a guy named Gideon Sundbeck, who basically came in and is, in my opinion, the true father of the zipper. All right, I think that seems like a natural break point. I thought so, too. Tease it there with Gideon Sundbeck and we will come right back and talk about Sundbeck right after this.

["Pomp and Circumstance"] On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Wanna learn about a terrorist or an uncolored actor? How to take a pervert, boobin' all about fractals. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun,

the Lizzie Board of Murders and the Cannibal Runs. Gonna explain everything to your brain, explode, just chuck, enjoy, this stuff you should know. No, no, no, no. Word up, Jerry. There was a 110% chance that this is gonna be a little sillier than average.

What, the zipper episode? Mm-hmm. All right, cause they're so silly. They are. So before we broke, I don't know, if you remember, you called Gideon's son back the true father of the zipper. He, did I say that?

I don't know, but he is the father of the zipper because he made what we all recognize as a zipper. He was Swedish born and he was an electrical engineer, which is kind of interesting. You would think mechanical, but I guess he just knew how to tinker with things. He was a bit of a show off, apparently. Oh, yeah?

Well, I mean, he was an electrical engineer who was the father of the zipper. Come on. Oh, I got you. You know? He was a glory hog. Colonel Bruce Springsteen. He was hired to work for that universal fastener company

and he married the plant manager's daughter, one Elvira Aronson. That's a great name. Which, he was talented, so I'm not saying he got it surely because of nepotism, but he did get a position as a head designer at that company. And he was like, this security fastener is okay, but it really ain't all that.

His wife very sadly passed on in 1911. And that really just gave him the time to pour himself into a project. Couple of years later, December of 1913, Bada Bing, Bada Boom, you've got the zipper. Yeah. He created the hookless number one and the hookless number two.

And he said in an interview later that like the key was getting rid of those hooks. It's terrible hooks. The hooks, everyone was so sick of these stupid hooks. But when he came up with the hookless number one and the hookless number two, and the hookless number two is what you would say, there's your modern zipper right there.

It was such a big deal that the company changed its name from universal fastener to hookless fastener company. Yeah. So that's a, I mean, that's pretty big. Like you know, you've kind of made it as the head designer. If you design a product and they changed the company name because of it.

And in this patent that Sunbat got, it basically, it improved on that security fastener in a number of ways. Rather than, I think four clasps per inch, he, well, he changed the clasps to teeth. That was a big first step. Yeah. Huge.

And then rather than four clasps per inch, he added at least 10 or 11 teeth per inch. So the more teeth or the more points of contact where the fabric's showing together, the stronger that bond is going to be. He also created something, a machine to produce it with. And that's, I think,

where his electrical engineering stuff came in. Yeah, the scrapless machine took this Y-shaped wire, cut these little scoops out, and then punch that scoop dimple and little nib, and then clamped each one of those on a cloth tape. And all these words sound weird when you're just saying them like that. He invented the zipper.

He did. Think of the zipper, look down at your zipper, and that's what he did. That's what all those words mean. Yeah. And again, like the stuff he was working with, the foundation wasn't like, it wasn't a hop, skip, and a jump.

This guy, like, really, he really contributed to the world, basically. Yeah, and the world caught on. He was making a few hundred feet of these a day initially. And the US Army said, hey, these are great, because here's what we've got going on. We don't have pockets on our sailor's pants. I don't know why.

And so they need to keep stuff in there. So we give everybody these little fanny packs, basically, these little money belts, and they're always losing their money, these sailors. So we gotta have these zippers. We need 24,000 of these to keep the sailor money inside their fanny packs. Yeah, I think they just assumed that from that point on,

anytime they went into port, they would come back with all of their money. It still didn't work, but it was clear they hadn't lost it along the way. They just spent it all. Yeah, so 24,000 that year, in 1918, they ordered 10,000 for pilot flight suits, which makes sense.

Sure. Gotta have those things. They sealed up. And it still wasn't called a zipper at this point, though. That was the BF Goodrich Company, who actually used his fastener, sun backs, on these galoshes that they put out in 1925. You notice it made a little zip sound.

And so they called these boots zippers. It wasn't actually the zipper. They called the boots the zippers. Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. The first use of the word zipper describe boots, not the zippers on the boots. Pretty cool.

I love it. And BF Goodrich, I think they still make at least souls for shoes too. Oh yeah? Yeah. Imagine going to the store and buying a pair of BF Goodrich galoshes. You know those things are gonna last.

I would think so. You're wearing tires, right? Right. You can only buy them at the tire store, the most boring place on earth. Oh yeah, with the worst coffee and the worst magazines. Yeah. Unless you're into monster trucking or bass fishing.

Right. Then you're in hog heaven. So for the first little bit, that's what the zipper was used for. They were used for boots. They were used in the military. There were tobacco pouches and I guess these little money belts.

And they weren't used on clothes though. It took about 20 years for the fashion industry to come around and say, I think these beat the button in the clasp. Yeah. For a couple of reasons. One, these early zippers were not the best. They didn't work every time.

They would wear out pretty quickly. And they were still rather expensive. This is like cutting edge technology at the time. Zippers were not cheap. But one of the other big reasons why zippers took a while to catch on, even after they started being used in menswear, was because they were viewed as improper for women,

which I hadn't heard of, have you? No, I mean, it doesn't surprise me, but it's hysterical and awful to think about the fact that they didn't initially want zippers because it made it way too easy for women to take their clothes off. Yeah, like that would just be it. Like, oh, well, I can take my clothes off a little more

easily than I could if these were buttons. So I'm going to become promiscuous as a result. Yeah, just because that extra 30 seconds, the mood passes. Yeah, it's true. Like, well, yeah, I mean, if you have trouble getting buttons off, I could see getting frustrated and that could kill the mood.

So maybe they were onto something. Yeah, but in the movie set during this time, the Todrick couple rips open the bodice and they all laugh as those clasps are falling to the floor. Yeah, it's true. It's true. Zipper's not as funny. No, but it does make a seductive purr

when it's pulled down at just the right timing. Yeah, and the right speed. It's titillating, it's arousing. You're like, yeah, there's nothing more titillating than a quick little zip that's open. Right, like no. No, or more of a... Oh, man, you gotta stop.

Isn't that nice? Yeah, it's getting a little warm down here in the basement. I know, I'm glad we're not in the same room right now. So corsets especially found the zipper, the corset industry was like, no way are we gonna use those vulgar zippers on these things. We have morals. We're the fashion industry.

And there were even designers. Elsa, ooh, Shia Parelli and Edward Malineau or Malineau, they were sort of teasing the establishment by purposefully including zippers and saying like, we don't even need these, but look, we're doing it anyway, because it's the 1930s. Right, in your face establishment.

That's right, button establishment. Big clasp. Right, one of the other big things that pushed things forward was the use of zippers and jeans. And to this day, there is a long standing debate that I read about on the Levi's 501 Blues blog. Wow. Between zippers and button jeans.

And apparently there's purists who are like buttons were first. They were on the first pair of Levi's back in 1873, I think. Because they didn't have anything better? Basically, yeah. Zipper people say, well, yeah. And then zippers came along and we didn't need buttons anymore.

Stop living in the past, man. But there's still an ongoing debate and raging debate. But if you were to travel back to the 1930s and pick up a copy of Esquire magazine, you would find that the battle of the fly, I believe is what it was called, was declared dead and that the zipper won. Was Esquire around back then?

Oh yeah. Oh, nice. Yeah, just cutting edge stuff. I am not opposed to a 501 button fly. I agree that it's kind of classic. I'm generally a zipper guy a hundred percent, but I don't mind a button fly. I was reading a recent Esquire write up

about the 1930s Esquire write up. Which is kind of weird now I think about it. But they were saying like, yes, the button does have some advantages. It's a lot harder to forget when you leave the bathroom than it is, you know, your fly. But it's harder to open up when you really need to pee. That's a big problem.

Yeah, but as an adult, you can kind of regulate that, right? No, not me. I have that brain bladder connection like going full bore. Yeah, I guess I can see that. So like having to fumble with buttons while you're like about to just pee yourself. It's not a good thing.

But anyway, Esquire also put it like this. They said that the button fly also adds bulk, but not in the desirable spinal tap way, in a, do you have some sort of terrible condition way? It was pretty great. So I think that right there kind of wins the zipper debate. Yeah. Well, you know, the other thing

that won't happen with a button fly is you're not gonna pull something about Mary moment. Hey, we'll save that for the end. I'm just saying. All right, so in the 1930s, we've got children's clothing being a big sort of sales pitch for zippers because they're like,

hey, you want a kid that can put their own clothes on and get to that factory super fast, right? Give them zippers. So I think that's pretty genius actually. Yeah, I mean, he wants to, I mean, butting up a child's clothing is the worst. Right, especially if you have to use one of a very dangerous button hook to do it.

Yeah, it's just not a good idea. You don't get that anywhere near a kid. So as is usual with fashion, the children's fashion leads the way and pave the way for zippers to come in, like I said, to men's trousers, eventually women's clothing. And then women's jeans, zippers were finally added to jeans because of women.

Apparently Western women were totally fine with the button fly, but back East, they were a little more modest and decided the button fly allowed too much breeze to blow through. And so Levi's added zippers to their jeans to try to market them to women in the East and the mid-40s. I'm surprised women were wearing jeans in the mid-40s. I was surprised by that too.

Smells like Catherine Hepburn's work, if you ask me. But on those jeans, ladies. That was amazing. So these, I used to do a pretty good Catherine Hepburn. That was not my best effort. That was still pretty good. You old poop. So they went from producing the Hookless Fastener Company,

24,000 zippers that first year in 1917. In 1934, 60 million by 1971 at 2.3 billion. Yes, that is astounding. And by 1971, they had changed their name again from Universal Fastener to Hookless Fastener to now Talon, make a note of that. Oh, that's right. Yeah, put a little pin in that.

Okay. So these were zippers that were, and we have all the name, these were called closed-in zippers. That is, it's on a pair of jeans or something. It's not like you're trying to put together two completely unattached things like a jacket, let's say. That's the next big thing. Yeah, so yeah, there's actually apparently

three main kinds of zippers, which I wasn't aware of, but the ones like on jeans or whatever, that's the closed-in, the ones that separate, like on a jacket or something like that, that opens all the way, those are open-end. And then you've got the show-offs of the zipper world, the two-way zippers. Yeah, they think they're all that.

Yeah, but apparently, and there's like all sorts of subcategories too, like for example, there's the two-way closed zipper, where when you open the thing, you have to pull the zipper slides toward one another, and when they meet, they keep one another from sliding off or opening further. But if you look at the, say, suitcase or whatever, it actually forms an X with the two zipper slides

in the middle, that's an X-type two-way closed zipper in industry lingo. Yeah, and it's here that I should point out that something that I don't think I've ever talked about much on the show, but I am a bag enthusiast. I am. Backpacks, luggage, over-the-shoulder bags, messenger bags. Merces.

I've got, oh, I do have a Merse. Shout out to Nutsack Merces. No, no. N-U-T-S-A-C. Sure, it's great. Still doesn't matter. No, that's the name of the company. Oh, oh, gotcha.

It's got a little acorn on the front of it. That's very cheeky, obviously, but I stand by my Nutsack, it's great. Let me ask you, how did you end up becoming like a bag guy? I don't know, man, there's something about finding the perfect bag with all, there's something about all the compartments that fit just the right things.

I don't know. I think I'm a little bit of a OCD spectrum thing that I've talked about here and there over the years with stepping on cracks and doing certain things in equal amount of times with each foot and each hand. Like I don't let it drive me or control me, but all that stuff is in there. And I think it has something to do with my bag thing,

is having, seeking out the perfect bag that holds all of my things in exactly the right way. Very nice. But I mean, when did this start? Was it like middle school, high school, college? I think I always was sort of into them, but like was happy to just have the backpack that was just okay, because I was young and broke.

But now that I'm an adult, I can try a couple of different bags out. And I recycled them, I don't have a room full of bags. Emily will disagree and say that I have far too many bags and some that don't get used. But I did just recently sell a bag to a guy. Like how, like on the street? No, it was, I put it on Facebook

and it was ended up going to a husband of someone I knew that he was like, he wants this thing. I was like, great. So anyway, I have a bag thing and there's a sub category of people on the internet, travel people that are really into bags and especially zippers. That's where this all comes in.

There is a lot of zipper talk on the sites because they're not all designed well and you gotta have a really great zipper system in order to be a great bag. That is the thing. That's one of the best, easiest ways you can tell a knockoff bag, even a well-made knockoff bag from the real thing is how good is the zipper?

Yeah, I get the impression that really nice zippers aren't the cheapest things to include in a bag. No, no, because anybody can dash off a zipper. We could make one right now if we wanted to. Sure. It was arts and crafts time, but it's not. It's talking time, but we couldn't make a really well-made zipper.

No, and a complaint you'll see oftentimes on these websites is travel websites is great bag, but boy, why did they put this zipper on this thing? Right, and so I mean, when you put a zipper on a bag or a pair of jeans or something like that, it is done. Like there's not any redoing this thing. Like if it's a good zipper, great. If it's a bad zipper, you've just ruined the bag

or ruined the jeans. And then once the zipper inevitably breaks, the bag is useless, the jeans are useless. And that's actually a mark in the favor of buttons. You can replace a button that pops off when the zipper breaks. Yeah, you can fix it. There's definitely videos on how to deal

with different zipper issues. But when it's broken broken, it's a problem. It's a lot more of a problem than when a button pops off, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I agree. And here's the point where I'm going to call on you. Maybe we'll take a break. I knew you were gonna do this.

I am, because you somehow made describing how a zipper works confusing. So this is on you and we'll talk, Josh will explain exactly how a zipper works right after this. Oh man. Here's what 80s gonna show tonight, any guy you miss once you're in town.

Yeah, make sure it'sün this evening and then see you tonight at Continues AMZ. 5-7-8-2-2-1 On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90's called David Lacher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classics show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

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Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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Gink is gone. A till of the hunt. The Lizzie Board of Murders and the Cannibal Runs. I'm gonna explain everything to your brain. Explode. Just chuck. And chuck. This stuff you should know.

Oh, you should know. Word up, Jerry. So let me think of some movies. Have you seen, have you seen Altered Carbon? I know it's not a movie. It's a good TV show, though. I have not. That's good.

I already talked about Ozarks recently, right? Yeah. Are you putting this off? Yeah. All right, I'll describe how to use a zipper. Because I didn't realize this before. Did you know just how a zipper worked? Sure.

You did not. I did. You can look at it and tell how it works. Well, I've looked at plenty of zippers, and I guess it hasn't sunk in. I finally had to read about it. What did you think was going on down there? Magic.

I thought a little magic wizard lived in each zipper slide and would be like, Alakazoo. I think what you're saying is you didn't realize all those parts had names. Maybe. That's definitely part of it. But no, I also didn't understand the physics. I'm going to do this.

You ready? Stand back. All right. So with every kind of zipper, you have teeth. And you put the teeth together, and you have a zipper chain. You have the thing that moves up and down the zipper. That's called the slide. And the slide itself is usually made up of the slide body

that the zipper teeth go through, a bridge that's connected to the slide body, and a puller or a tab that's connected to the bridge. OK? OK. OK. So when these teeth are manufacturers, we'll talk about in a second, they're

made so that they're all the exact same size and shape. But then when they're connected, they're offset so that if you take two teeth in between the teeth, a little hole or hollow or valley forms, and the teeth on the opposite side of the fabric that's going to be connected, the tooth fits into that hollow just so. But it doesn't fit in just so so that it could just

pull right out. It has a little hook on the end of it. And so when the slide body comes in contact with the teeth on either side, it has wedges inside the slide body that kick those teeth up at an angle or down at an angle. And it also pulls them together. So it actually takes the tooth and puts it at an angle

so that it fits into the hollow between the other two teeth on the other side. And then as it passes by, that tooth goes back to horizontal and it's locked in. The little hook on the end locks it into that hollow. And from being locked in, it provides stability for the teeth that are connected on either side above it and so on and so forth.

So that as the slide finally reaches at the top, it hits a stop, which keeps the slide from going off the end. And it's done its little job. When it comes back down, when you pull down on the slide to unzip, it actually uses a reverse wedge, a plow, to kick those wedges back up and separate them so that the hook tooth can easily pull out of the hollow and separate.

And that, friend, is how a zipper works. That's great. Oh, I haven't pressed record. I just went and had a Mike's Mighty Good Ramen. I had one of those too. I had the kimchi one. I had the pork. That was good, Chuck.

If you hadn't checked out, I was, frankly, expecting a little round of applause. Oh, people are clapping all over the world right now. Good, OK. So it is great. It's such an elegant design because what you're doing here, and it's easy to take for granted, but what you are tasked with doing with making a quality zipper

is making something that is very, very easy to zip up and down or back and forth because you don't want that thing to get hung up or to be hard to pull. It's got to be really easy, but it also has to be super, super secure. And the marriage of those two things, I think, is kind of really speaks to the elegance of the design of the zipper.

Exactly. And the more well-designed and well-manufactured the teeth are, the tighter that bind is going to be because they fit together so precisely. Yeah, if you've had zipper problems and bad zippers, that's when you really need to thank your lucky stars that people are out there designing and making great zippers. Right, which are just too expensive to easily be attained.

Or when that stop doesn't work and you go to zip up of that jacket and also you're holding that pull tab in the bridge, like a dummy. Yeah, so you try to feed it back on there. It's the worst. So there's actually little clamps that you can put on a broken zipper. I saw a video about this that fit in between the top two

teeth on either side. And then you just take some needle nose pliers and basically clamp it on the inside and outside of the zipper fabric tape. And that will stop that slide. So if the slide ever comes off because one of the stops broke off, you can actually take not at all drastic measures to fix your zipper.

Not me, man. I throw that jacket in the garbage. Just set it on fire first. I do. Release all the methane inside. I do, and then I sweep up the ashes, I urinate on them, and I put it in the garbage. You turn it into a six-pack ring and throw it into the ocean.

No, that is a good tip, actually, because there are ways to darn socks and fix zippers. And we live in a disposable society. So if you have a cheap zipper or if you really like a jacket and it has a terrible zipper, you could take it to a place and they could probably put the zipper of choice on there. But that's a lot of work. It is a lot of work.

There are things that you can do yourself. You can also, if the zipper slide is not doing a very good job any longer of connecting the teeth, it's probably because the wedges inside are a little loose, a little far apart. Again, needle nose pliers are your best friend. Pinch the zippers from the side and from the front and back. You're not the zipper, the slide mechanism, sorry.

And it will produce a tighter grip on the zipper teeth from that point on. Basically, you're breathing new life into your zipper slide. Yeah. And I failed to mention that I'm also an outdoorsman in camper my whole life. So aside from my bag fetish, sleeping bags, intense, that's a real big deal to have the right zipper

on those things. Yeah. The worst is, and especially on tense, the design such that when you're zipping it, the little flap gets zipped up in the zipper. Yes, that's pretty bad. It's awful. It is.

And that's something you can deal with yourself, but zippers can also get stuck over time, especially if it's a metal zipper and it's starting to corrode. Yeah, it'll wear out. They don't like to slide nearly as much. There are little things, little tips and tricks you can do to unstick a zipper that's a little corroded. One of the first things you can do is take a graphite pencil

and rub it on the teeth just below the zipper. And graphite's a dry lubricant and it'll help you unzip it. If the pencil doesn't work, try a little bit of dry bar soap. And if that doesn't work, just spray a little squirt, tiny stream of Windex on there and let it sit for a little while. And that should unzip your corroded or gunky zipper, too. Very good tips here from Uncle Josh.

Right. So there's some other things, like we just basically described how a zipper works, what a zipper is made out of, or what the components are. There are some other things that they make some little fancy-dancy kind of accoutrement to zippers. One of the things that comes in handy, say, like with a tent or something, when you want the zipper to stay

up, is a locking slide to where it won't, like you could pull the zipper apart and it won't come apart because that slide won't move. It only moves when you pull on the tab because it lifts the locking mechanism as you slide up or down. That's a good one. They also make magnetic zippers, which is good for one-handed

zipping and unzipping. It's amazing. I think so, too. So let's talk a little bit about how it's made. And then we're going to bring it home with a little manufacturing and medical action, OK? Yeah, so zippers, it depends on what it's made out of, obviously, with how it's made.

A lot of zippers you'll see are metal. They can be flat or they can be profiled. They can be made of aluminum, nickel, brass, nickel-free white brass, white brass, nickel aluminum, brass aluminum, Nickelodeon. I'm just reporting what I found on the internet. I'm not making fun of you. They can be diecast out of zinc alloy,

directly onto that tape. And you end up just sewing that or gluing that onto the material. And I imagine that might be a bit of a more robust zipper. Yeah, that machine that Gideon's Sunbeck came up with is still the design principle of it. It's still in use in some zipper manufacturers, where they take wire and just pinch and pull and clamp

the zipper teeth out of wire onto the zipper tape, the fabric that's going to be put onto the material that the zippers applied to you. That's right. If you're working with plastic, there's basically two main ways. And I saw really great how it's made. It's like five minutes long, but it just explains it all. With plastic, there's a couple of reasons

why you would want plastic. You can actually manufacture plastic to more precise design specifications if you're doing it right than metal zipper, which means that it may actually provide a stronger grip. It also doesn't corrode, although metal zippers are typically thought of as tougher over time, but they will corrode. Plastic doesn't corrode.

But if you're making plastic, you can make it a couple of ways. One, you can make it basically just like a metal zipper is made by die casting it. And then another way is to actually print it onto the tape. So like the whole zipper to the exact length you want is just basically formed and melted onto the fabric tape, and then there's your zipper.

And plastic can be super, super solid. It's not like a plastic zipper has to be cheap. No. And then if you want a flexible plastic zipper, there's something called a woven coil nylon zipper. And you've probably seen this before like on a dress that's meant to have movement or something like that. It's a very thin, it's almost like a nest of nylon woven

on either side, and the zipper just moves up and down it. Wow. You've seen those before. I'm sure I have. Don't play me, bro. Most of my dress is required movement, that's for sure. So I think we should talk a little bit about YKK. If you've ever looked down and seen a zipper,

the chances are you have if you've ever worn any article of clothing and seen YKK, that stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikasha, which is a Japanese company that makes these, where else? Macon, Georgia. Yeah, that's like their biggest plan is in Macon. Yeah, and I knew it was in Macon, actually. They make about 5 million zippers a day.

They started making zippers, the Japanese company, in 1934. They make theirs out of copper alloy, and they're really smart. This is a company that they build the machines that make the zippers. They build the boxes and make the boxes that they ship them in. So they have a lot of control over the pricing

of their supply chain, which is a great way to make a lot more money than you would if you were outsourcing that stuff. Right, exactly. And so YKK came up. They started in 1934, but by 1970, they really started to take over the zipper industry. So much so that prior to 1970, a little company

called Talon, which you might know of as the Hookless Basterner Company, had 70% of the market share, 7 out of all 10 zippers that you found in the world were made by Talon. And by 1971, suddenly YKK had like 40% of that. And they were the big kid on the block for decades until basically recently when some Chinese firms started to really come up, too.

Yeah, and the Chinese firms, there used to be hundreds of these, and they have now sort of been consolidated down to like, how many do they have over there now? About a dozen? Yeah, but there's really two big ones now, SBS and YKK. Right, and a lot of these Chinese companies will be called things like YQQ or YCC,

obviously trying to sort of rip off the YKK company. And it's like any business where there are some big, big players, there's fierce, fierce rivalries in the zipper industry. Yumi said that when she was a kid, her mom wouldn't buy something if the zipper wasn't YKK. Sure. You know, it's a quality zipper right there, made by relatives of the Almond Brothers, probably.

That's right, that's where the museum is. So that's why YKK is found on most of your zippers because of this company that has been doing this for a very long time, right? It's pretty amazing. And I feel like, Chuck, we would be remiss in talking about zippers. If we also didn't talk about, as you kind of teased earlier,

Genitalia getting caught in zippers, which is one of the big drawbacks of zipper technology. Yeah, the very famous Seinfeld episode when he's remarking about his button flies. Do you want to do your best Jerry Seinfeld here? This is the one place on my wardrobe. I do not need sharpened or locking metal teeth. Oh, I think you had Seinfeld confused

with Silence of the Lambs. Which one, Buffalo Bill or Hannibal Lecter? Seinfeld of the Lambs. Oh, wait, let me see if I can do that. This is the one place on my wardrobe. I do not need sharpened or locking metal teeth. Except he would not have a zipper on his kimono. Was that better or worse the second time?

I don't know. They were both great. I think worse I'm going with. Yeah, there are zipper injuries, mostly with boys and men. There was a group in 2013 and the urologists in San Francisco that's published an actual study about zipper injuries in between 2002 and 2010. There were close to 18,000 men and boys

who had had zipper accidents at the emergency room with some variation of a something about Mary type of injury. Yeah, that's just the ones that were bad enough to go to the emergency room. Yeah, not the ones that are like, let me just put some ointment on that. Right, but that's exactly the treatment that those guys got at the emergency room.

Apparently, the treatment for it was described by a pediatric doctor who said, I'm just going to read this whole thing, okay? Yes. You want to just pour mineral oil all over the patient's genitalia and the zipper. Be generous. That's the key. This is pretty cheap stuff.

Then let the patient sit there for 20 or 30 minutes, pack them in a room somewhere. And when you come back, the foreskin will have simply slipped out of that zipper. Although in some cases, you may need a cotton swab to help it along a bit. You know my favorite part of that whole quote, right? What?

It was when he's talking about how inexpensive mineral oil is. Right. Because you know mineral oil, you can just afford to just douse your testicles with that stuff because it's pretty cheap. Right. This isn't like, you know, something Martin Scherkeli would invest in.

What? Oh, God. That guy. Farmer, bro. Yeah. He would never buy into a mineral oil company. Not profitable enough. I guarantee you he's trying to get rich off of coronavirus.

Yes. I think he's in prison again. Well, he's probably got his minions. Yeah, probably. So yeah, you can get your junk zipped up in there. I don't understand why a man would go commando. To me, the underwear is one of the biggest benefits is to avoid zipper-related injuries.

That's right. But people do it. And I just imagine you got to be super careful. Yeah, not just men too. There were five women in that group of 17,616 emergency room visits. Five women got caught in there. But for young boys, Chuck, I thought this was the fact of the podcast.

The number one cause of penile injury was not zippers. Zippers were second. Number one was getting smashed by the toilet lid. How, for real? Yeah, I mean, you know, they're right there at lid height. I guess so. I was forgetting about the height difference. Yeah.

Okay. It's sad. You got anything else? Poor guys. I got nothing else. Well, that's zippers, everybody. We made it through. Zippers is the new sun.

And since I said zippers is the new sun, it's time for a listener mail. This is from Kirsten, and we're going to, not exclusively, but I like reading these emails about how we're helping folks out during this weird, weird time of isolation. This is one of those. Hey, guys, thanks so much for the podcast. My boyfriend Matt introduced me to stuff you should know a while back,

and it has been a godsend for our relationship. You see, on car rides and road trips, he always wants to listen to something that he will learn from. I, on the other hand, am much more interested in listening to something funny and lighthearted. Your podcast strikes the perfect balance. Every time we listen to your show, we always laugh together, and we both learn a little something, too. Kirsten, we've been trying to explain that in such a succinct way for 12 years now.

Yeah, that was really well done. Matt works in the ICU, and has been working long hours amid the coronavirus pandemic. To pass the time alone at home, I've been listening to a lot of stuff you should know. So I want to thank you guys for keeping me company, and if you wanted to give a shout out to Matt and all of our amazing healthcare workers across the country,

that would be awesome, and we certainly, certainly want to do that. Yeah, give it up like it's 8 p.m. for all of the healthcare workers, including Matt. That's right. That is beyond everything that's going on with this. It's not like everyone decided to take a break from getting hurt and needing to go to the emergency room. Yes, dude. Have you been more careful than usual, just to make sure you don't accidentally need to go?

No, I can't think about that stuff, because that's when I will get hurt. I thought about it climbing up a ladder in my house. Well, I don't know if I'd be doing a ladder work right now. I had to. It looked like there was a carpenter B that made its way through our upper window, and I had to look. Well, I'm glad you were careful, but yeah, it's that kind of just hit me the other day that like, oh, wait, there's still all the other hospital stuff that has to happen right now.

Yeah, it's true. I have a friend who's a OR nurse, I believe, and she was saying that she'd been basically furloughed for the moment because any elective surgery was put on hold, which is understandable, but she was explaining that elective meant like your gallbladder needs to be removed or you have a tumor that needs to be removed. It was considered elective, at least temporarily, I think that she's back at work again, but that's how bad it was. It was just like, if it doesn't have to do with COVID, no, just say no. Yeah, I mean, I was just about to schedule an eye surgery, and I'm definitely going to wait a while to do that. Yeah, I can imagine. Well, that was great. Who is that from?

That was from Kirsten and Matt. And Matt, yes. Well, thanks a lot, Kirsten, and thanks a lot, Matt, and thanks a lot to everybody who's fighting the good fight on the front lines of the healthcare battle right now, looking out for all of us. Our hats are off to you. If you want to get in touch with us like Kirsten and Matt did, well, get in touch with us via email. Wrap your email up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are

wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.