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# Velcro was copied from the burrs stuck to a dog
- URL: https://oddly-enough.ghost.io/velcro-was-copied-from-the-burrs-stuck-to-a-dog/
- Published: 2026-10-16T10:47:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-16T10:47:13.000Z
- Description: Most people would pick the burrs off. George de Mestral reached for a microscope.
- Author: Oddly Enough

| I own four umbrellas and could find none of them yesterday. 1 Waking up unable to move is more common than you think 🛏️ Sleep paralysis, waking or falling asleep unable to move, is far more common than most people realise. In 2011 Brian Sharpless and Jacques Barber pooled 35 studies covering 36,533 people for a review in Sleep Medicine Reviews, and found that a little under 8 percent of the general population had experienced it at least once. Among students the figure was about 28 percent, and among psychiatric patients nearly 32 percent. The researchers defined it as a discrete period during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, while eye movements and breathing carry on as normal. What makes it frightening is what can come with it. People describe a sense of an intruder in the room, pressure on the chest, or a feeling of floating out of the body. These experiences have been linked to folklore about demons that attack during sleep and, more recently, to stories of alien abduction. Sharpless started the work because he could not find reliable prevalence figures, and he argued that sleep paralysis should be assessed more regularly and uniformly. I think the most useful thing the review did was simply put a number on it, because an experience that feels uniquely terrifying is easier to live with once you know millions of people share it. 2 Velcro was copied from the burrs stuck to a dog 🐕 George de Mestral, born in Switzerland in 1907 and trained as an electrical engineer, came back from a hike with his dog covered in burrs. Most people would have picked them off. He put one under his microscope. He found it was covered in tiny hooks that held tightly to the loops in his clothing and the hairs in his dog's fur. That gave him the idea for a fastener with two sides, one covered in small hooks and the other in tiny loops. Getting it right took time. At first his hooks and loops were the wrong size, and he eventually found that nylon, not cotton, made the best hooks. The design was perfected in 1955, and he named it Velcro, from velours and crochet. It has since been used by NASA to keep objects tied down on space shuttle missions, which is a long way from a dog walk. 3 A Chinese company built a copy of an Austrian village 🏘️ Hallstatt is a village of about 900 people in Austria, a UNESCO World Heritage site that lives on tourism. In 2012 it discovered that it had a twin. A subsidiary of China Minmetals, China's largest metals trader, had built a replica in Huizhou, in Guangdong province. The villagers found out by accident, when a Chinese guest at a Hallstatt hotel who was involved in the project let it slip. Staff from the developer had been mingling with tourists, taking photographs and gathering measurements, which had already made some locals suspicious. Reactions in Austria were mixed, and at least one local hotel owner was far from pleased. The mayor, Alexander Scheutz, took a different view. We are very proud, he said, and he signed a cultural exchange agreement with the new Hallstatt. So the original village now has an official partner that is also a copy of itself. 4 The computer mouse made its public debut in 1968 🖱️ On December 9, 1968, at a computer conference in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart and his team from the Stanford Research Institute gave a 90-minute public demonstration that is still talked about. Connected by a microwave link to their computer in Menlo Park, they showed hypertext links, real-time text editing, multiple windows and shared-screen teleconferencing. And they controlled it all with a mouse. The first prototype had been built in 1964 by Bill English, SRI's chief engineer, a small device whose wheels translated the movement of your hand into movement on the screen. Engelbart was named inventor on the patent, filed in 1967 and issued in 1970, under the title X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System. It is still an oddly formal name for something most people simply call a mouse. SRI now describes the event as the world debut of personal and interactive computing. 5 Facebook's Like button was almost called Awesome ⭐ In July 2007, early discussions inside Facebook about a one-click way to approve of a post called it the awesome button. When someone later suggested like instead, the reaction was lukewarm. It took far longer than anyone expected. Andrew Bosworth, who worked on it, has said it took nearly two years to get the idea off the ground. In November 2007 the team showed it to Mark Zuckerberg and the review did not go well. He worried that a button would overshadow sharing and commenting, and work on it basically stopped. In December 2008 a new team revived what some colleagues called a cursed project. A data scientist, Itamar Rosenn, showed that the button did not reduce comments, which eased Zuckerberg's concerns, and Like launched on February 9, 2009, with a blog post titled I like this. Two years of meetings went into a button that takes a fraction of a second to press. Have a good weekend, and keep an eye on any burrs. |
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