B

　　Do you know who invented the slide-fastener, or rather, the zipper（拉链）? No one thought of anything like the zipper until Whitcomb Judson came along. Judson’s slide-fastener was an out-of-blue invention. No one knows what gave him the idea. No one even knows much about him, except that he was a mechanical engineer living in Chicago and that he patented other inventions to do with a street railway system and motorcars.

　　Judson invented the first zipper in 1891. This ingenious little device looks very simple, and the principle behind it is simple, too; yet it took a lot of years, together with another inventor to make the zipper really practical.

　　The zipper had to be produced cheaply, because no one would pay a lot of money for it. Judson invented a machine to mass-produce his slide-fastener. But the machine was terribly complicated and kept on breaking down. So in 1905 Judson invented a new fastener, the C-curity, which was easier to manufacture. Clothing manufacturers, however, were not the least bit interested in trying out the fasteners, so the only way Judson could get them on to the market was by letting pedlars（小贩） sell them from door to door. Moreover, the C-curity fastener was clumsy and had a bad habit of bursting open at inconvenient times.

　　Then a young Swedish engineer called Sundback came to work for Judson’s struggling company. He thought hard and decided that the interlocking parts needed to be much smaller to give the fastener greater flexibility and to stop it bursting open. After several attempts, Sundback invented a really practical fastener in 1913. It is in all important ways the same as the one we use today.

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