The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I was invented by a man walking his dog.
My real inventor was a plant, and it was not trying to be helpful.
I have two sides and neither of them is any use alone.
NASA used me so enthusiastically that people still think NASA made me.
The scratchy strip and the fuzzy strip that grip each other.
Velcro
George de Mestral put the burrs stuck to his dog under a microscope in 1941, found thousands of tiny hooks, and spent the next eight years turning an annoyance into a fastener.
George de Mestral came back from a walk in the Alps in 1941 with burdock burrs stuck to his trousers and his dog, and did what almost nobody does: he put one under a microscope. Each burr carried hundreds of tiny hooks, and the fabric offered loops. Turning that into a manufacturable fastener took eight years and a loom modified to weave loops that could be cut into hooks. The name is French: velours plus crochet. NASA used it everywhere in spacecraft, which is how the persistent myth got started that NASA invented it.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #34 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #33. Next: mystery #35. Or try #23, #24, #25, #26, #27, #28.