Whitcomb Judson applied for a patent for his slide fastener, the "Clasp Locker or Unlocker for Shoes" (U.S. Patent No. 504,038) on November 7, 1891. The patent took almost twenty-two months to be issued. During this time, Judson applied for a second patent, significantly modifying his design for the fastenings. In the second patent, which was issued at the same time as the first, the clasps are simplified, looking more like hooks and eyes.
There is very little information about Whitcomb Judson himself. He seemed to be an ambitious, self-made, struggling, and eventually failing American mechaniac.His other describe overly complicated devices, such as a street railway that ran by long tubes kept spinning underground by compressed air. He clearly had a habit for making inventions which were too-clever, which rarely actually worked.
Gideon Sundback was hired by Peter Aronson, a machinist from Meadsville. by the Automatic Hook & Eye Company because they needed an engineer to fix their C-curity fastener's technical difficulties. Sundback was a Swedish immigrant with German training in electrical engineering. It's a little mysterious why he would move from Pittsburgh to Hoboken. The real reason he did this was because he was captivated by Aronson's daughter Elvira, whom he married in 1909.
Shortly after arriving at the company, Sundback released a new model, called the Plako fastener. While an improvement on the C-curity, the Plako was still unreliable because it wasn't flexible enough to stay shut when bent or twisted.
Around 1912, Sundback's wife died after giving birth to his daughter. The result was that in 1912 threw himself into his work and came up with a radically new design for the fastener. He named it the Hookless #1.
In 1913, Sundback came up with another model. He named it the Hookless #2. This was the modern zipper. Sundback had solved the problem...
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