Gideon Sundback's 132nd birthday: Google unzips the doodle

New Delhi: As you click on the doodle on the Google home page, honouring Gideon Sundback, the page unzips to reveal a search engine results page on the Swedish-born engineer.

Sundback's invention, the zipper, has been holding together much of the parts of our lives for about a century now.

Sundback (born April 24, 1880) had emigrated to the United States a job switch later, he started working for a company that designed and manufactured fasteners.

$Gideon Sundback\'s b\'day: Google unzips the doodle$

Gideon Sundback's invention, the zipper, has been holding together much of the parts of our lives for about a century now.

Sundback's design, that he finalised in 1913, had a zipper with interlocking oval scoops (earlier designs made use of hooks) that could be easily interlocked by moving a slider. The patent application for the new invention was filed in 1914 and issued in 1917.

At the time of its invention the zipper wasn't called a zipper and instead referred to as a 'separable fastener'. The word zipper was later made popular by the BF Goodrich Company, that used Sundback's 'separable fastener' for its products.

The zipper regularly finds a place in lists of inventions that shaped the world.

Tuesday's Google Gideon Sundback's 132nd birthday doodle gives the appearance of a jacket front that has the Google logo embroidered on it and a zipper runs through the middle of the Google logo, separating the second 'o'. To get to know what the doodle is all about users can either click on the logo or better, unzip to reveal what lies within.

Some Firefox users have reported that clicking on the Google Gideon Sundback doodle occasionally leads to a blank page.