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Lightning Fastener Company
A symbol of twentieth century industry and innovation, at it’s height, the Lightning Fastener Company employed over 500 people and manufactured more than 50 million zippers annually – all in this building located at 50 Niagara Street in St. Catharines.
The words, Lightning Fastener, certainly create vivid imagery. Speedy. Swift. Quick. An intuitive, easy-to-use mechanism to securely zip-up our clothing and accessories. Before the invention of what we now know as the zipper, we were plagued with troublesome buttons and finnicky hooks to secure our money bags, pouches, footwear, and more. Enter Swedish-American engineer Gideon Sundback, who, by 1917 and after a few prototypes, developed a system of two rows of interlocking teeth that were pulled together into a single piece by means of a slider. This seemingly simple innovation was ground-breaking, and the hookless fastener was immediately a commercial success.
The term “zipper” was coined by the B.F. Goodrich Company, who adopted Sundback’s Hookless Fastener for a line of galosh boots in 1923. The story goes that upon hearing the sound so distinctive of the sliding fastener, an employee apparently exclaimed, “Zip ‘er up!” The name stuck, despite the company’s attempts to control their trademark.
While Sundback’s zipper was actually invented for the company he worked for in Pennsylvania, he brought his invention to Canada to open his own zipper manufacturing operation. In 1937, the Lightning Fastener Company Plant opened here, at 50 Niagara Street, in St. Catharines. It was the first purpose-built factory in Canada dedicated to the manufacture of this product. At this time, the popularity of the zipper in fashion was growing exponentially! And the factory continued to expand to keep up with demand. In 1937 there were 139 million zipper sales in America; by 1941 the number had risen to 500 million.
This golden age of manufacturing lasted into the 1970s, when cheaper products made elsewhere were introduced to the rapidly globalizing market. This was a familiar reality for so many Canadian manufacturers at this time. It became harder and harder to remain competitive. After being acquired by the larger American company Textron in 1968, the plant was able to hold on and continued to produce quality zippers until 1981, when the company was again acquired by an even larger American corporation and St. Catharines operations were shut down later that year.
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A simple bit of history that I found very interesting. Thanks for sharing. I can sneak that in as a bit of trivia during dinner conversations with friends.
I worked for the Lightning Fastener Co. from 1972 to 1976 in the Toronto Office. It was a wonderful company with good staff and dedicated people. Quality was superb, but with increasing competition from Japan, and more and more imported clothing from China, the manufacturing sector was declining rapidly. Their fate was sealed.
There are a few of us discussing the history of zippers, particularly invisible zippers, on patternreview.com. Please join us. I would love to know what you learned of the history of zippers while working at the Lightning Fastener Co. Do you have any insight as to when invisible zippers were made available to the home sewing industry?
I wonder if the name lightning came before or after the French term: une fermeture éclair (lightning closure)?