Velcro

In 1941, a Swiss engineer, George de Mestral, noticed burs caught on his socks after a hike in the Alps. Rather than seeing these burs as a nuisance, and being an engineer or just plain curious, he looked at them under a microscope. He saw hundreds of tiny hairlike hooks on the burs.
 
Maybe he said to himself, “Oh, isn’t this interesting.” And that might have been that. But he likely also asked himself, “What can I do with this information?”
 
He invented a fastener which he originally called ‘locking tape’. Initially made with cotton, the fastener was later made from nylon and polyester.  In 1955, he patented this tape under the name Velcro, a combination of French velours (velvet) and crochet (little hook). In brief, vel(vet) + cro(chet).
 
Reference: Online Etymological Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro
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