The Man Who Copied a Burr
Written by Studio AM.
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In 1941, a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral came home from hunting with his trousers covered in burrs, the prickly seed cases of the burdock plant. So was his dog's fur. Most people pull burrs off and forget them. De Mestral put one under his microscope.
The burr had tiny hooks that caught in the threads of his trousers and tangled in his dog's fur. He wondered whether a strip of artificial hooks could grip another strip covered in loops. Pull the strips apart, and they could be joined again.
The copying took more than ten years. Cotton did not make durable hooks. Nylon worked better: heat treatment helped the material keep its shape through repeated use. He patented his fastener in 1955 and named the company Velcro, from the French words for velvet and hook.
The burr suggested a mechanism. Turning that observation into a useful product also required years of testing materials and manufacturing methods.
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Questions
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Question 1 of 4
What is the passage mainly about?
The answer is D: By studying why burrs stick, de Mestral turned nature's hook-and-loop trick into a fastener.
The passage moves from the burr on his trousers to the hooks under the microscope to the nylon fastener. The main idea joins the noticing to the invention.
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Question 2 of 4
The passage suggests that a good material for this fastener must
The answer is B: keep its shape after many uses
The comparison between cotton and nylon shows why hooks must retain their shape through repeated use.
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Question 3 of 4
In this passage, a "fastener" is
The answer is A: a device that holds two things together and can open again
He patented it after making hooks that survive thousands of openings and closings, so a fastener must join things and release them. The burr is the seed case, and velvet is only half of the name.
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Question 4 of 4
According to the passage, what did de Mestral see under the microscope?
The answer is C: Tiny hooks that caught in fabric and fur.
He saw the hooks holding the burr to threads and fur. The artificial fastener came later.
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