Charlotte 101.3 - Greenville 97.3 - Boone 92.9 - WSIF Wilkesboro 90.9
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

It's Zip It Day On Google

The Washington Post's Comic Riffs blog says it's "perhaps the company's most enticing Doodle yet."

Google is honoring the inventor of the modern zipper today with — what else? — a zipper running down the middle of its homepage. You can drag it up and down. When it finishes opening, it reveals a selection of links about the zipper and its inventor, Swedish-American Gideon Sundback. He was born 132 years ago today.

And as The Guardian reports:

"Before Sundback's intervention, the idea for a fastener based on interlocking teeth had circulated among engineers for more than 20 years but no one had perfected it. His innovation was to place a dimple on the underside of each tooth and a nib on the top that would sit securely within the dimple of the tooth above it.

"As a result, the join between two rows of teeth was then strong because no single tooth has enough room to move up or down and come apart. He also created the manufacturing machine for the new zipper."

IBN Live explains in more detail how Sundback's innovation worked.

Videos are already showing up that have some fun with Google's latest doodle.

As for whether it's the "most enticing" one so far, we have to profess a fondness for last year's Les Paul tribute.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.