Wrongly Named

On a summer day in 1948, a Swiss mountaineer named George de Mestral returned from a walk with his dog, who was covered with “burrs”--the plant seed-sacs that cling to animal fur in order to travel to fertile new planting grounds. He put a burr under a microscope, and saw the amazing sight of small hooks that enabled the seed-bearing burr to cling to the tiny loops in the fabric of his pants. He realized that they were intelligently designed, and from there George invented “Velcro” (a combination of the word velour and crochet). He should have called it “Copy-God.” Instead, Velcro was patented in 1955. The rest is history.