(RNN) - You may not know who Gideon Sundback is, but you definitely know his most famous invention.
On the inventor's 132nd birthday, the search engine literally unzips to honor the man who brought you the Hookless No. 2 - also known as the zipper.
Google's latest doodle lets you unzip the page to reveal everything you never knew you wanted to know about the man and his toothy device. He's known as the inventor of the zipper, but really he was the improver.
While working for the Universal Fastener Company, Sundback worked on (what else?) a universal fastener invented by other engineers, Max Wolff, Whitcomb Judson and Elias Howe, who also invented the sewing machine.
Theirs was called the "Judson C-curity Fastener." Only it wasn't all that secure.
It was a series of hooks with a sliding separator, which wasn't even really necessary because just pulling on it would separate them. So Sundback changed the hooks to teeth, and the Hookless No. 1 was born in 1914.
But it wasn't until 1923, when B.F. Goodrich bought a lot of Hookless No. 2's, that the device was given a zippy name.
Goodrich filed a patent for the "Zipper Boot" using the new universal fastener as its centerpiece. The zipper gained its modern popularity around World War II.
Now, everything can be zipped, except the Google homepage, which can only be unzipped. But it does, conveniently, stay in one piece.
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Google's homepage unzips with a click to honor the developer of the famous fastener. (Source: RNN)
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