The Fasten, The Furious

Recently, I found myself in a store I’ve never even considered walking into before, and my reason was out of a random obsession that appeared out of nowhere.

That store was JoAnn, the gradually liquidating fabrics store, and that random obsession was fasteners. Recently, I’ve wanted to do something very specific: I wanted to attach my giant cup with a handle onto my Chrome bag, which I finally replaced after some pain, and the attachment I found would rattle around too much for my liking.

Perhaps my search for the perfect bag is quixotic, but my decision to buy the same bag I owned worked out, and I want to find ways to make the bag as productive as it can be. As a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about fasteners. Sure, I just resurfaced a post about velcro, but I have increasingly found myself obsessed with side-release clamps.

You know the kind. The plastic buckles where you use two fingers to press in, and the two pieces of plastic disconnect from one another. It’s everywhere, and this is probably the first time you’ve heard someone talk about it. Ever.

Who came up with the idea of side-release clamps? Surprisingly for an object of such ubiquity, the answer is simple: It was conceived by just one inventor, a guy who shares a name with a hero plucked from the funnies. And like that comic-page hero, he showed surprising resourcefulness.

The fateful white-water rafting ride that gave us side-release buckles

The 1960s and 1970s were an important time in the history of outdoor gear. As pointed out in our history of the backpack, it was when a number of major innovations began to emerge, including some of the earliest uses of zippers, along with the addition of an aluminum frame.

A back-to-basics return to the outdoors had gained mainstream popularity, and it was also an excellent way to bring many of lessons of fabric design learned during the various World Wars to a mainstream audience. And speaking of war, there were many quite-recent Vietnam veterans out there who had gotten a taste of backpacking thanks to their time in an outdoor battlefront. That combination positioned the outdoor-gear industry nicely: There were lots of people who were familiar with the needs those military packs fulfilled—as well as the frustrations that were often hiding under the surface.

And some of those people, like Dick Tracy, ended up going into the outdoors industry. The Illinois-born Tracy, not to be mistaken for the wrist-phone comic book hero who was also born in Illinois, did not grow up with a lot of outdoors experiences in his life. But the Vietnam War proved an introduction to that kind of lifestyle, and when he settled in Colorado, he eventually gained a deep affinity for it.

It was something he experienced on the trail that eventually led him to develop the invention we’re discussing above. During a 2023 episode of Utah State University’s Highlander podcast, which traces the roots of innovations in the outdoors industry, he explained how a white-water rafting incident got him thinking about the importance of easy-access latches.

Tracy had hopped on a raft in a river, despite having an arm in a cast, because he thought it would be a serene experience. Turns out, he was wrong—the river was moving towards a waterfall—and he nearly drowned. In other words, if he could have gotten the bag off much more quickly, it would have been a potential lifesaver. At the time, hiking backpacks had stabilizing chest straps that were loop-through—and hard to remove with a single hand.

“I said, if I fell right now, I would drown before I got this backpack off,” he recalled. “And on the way home, just thinking, what would you do?”

Fortunately for him, he was in a position to do something about it. He worked for Illinois Tool Works (ITW), a major manufacturing firm, and he had been tasked with coming up with new product lines that could bring in millions of dollars. On top of this, the company had an existing relationship with a Swedish firm named AB Fixfabriken (sorry, that page is in Swedish; here’s a Google Translate link). That company’s claim to fame was a latch, called FixLock, that works similarly to a zipper fastener, but tightens two ends of a cord, rather than connecting the teeth of a zipper.

Fixlock worked, but the design required you to hold the string while moving the device.

“When you look at what was involved, you have two hands operating,” Tracy recalled on the podcast. “And I said, ‘If you just brought your hand up, your natural position is to squeeze with your thumb and forefingers.’ And that was why I said we got to take that, and ultimately came up with the side-release concept.”

The side-release was promising in part because it leveraged the properties of plastic—both its flexibility and rigidity—to create a device that was easy to use with a single hand.

Combined with an existing relationship with the plastics giant DuPont, and the side-release buckle was the perfect solution to this problem. From Tracy’s patent filing, first filed in 1977:

The buckle of this invention comprises a separable coupling device of relatively simple yet reliable design, suitable for releasably connecting and holding or otherwise joining or assembling two members to be united, such as strips of material, straps, wires, belts or the like, and further adapted for permitting adjustment of the overall length of the member once joined thereby. As a specific example, to which no limitation is intended, the buckle of this invention may be utilized for connecting the straps or belts of a life jacket, back pack or the like, wherein it is desirable to securely and yet releasably couple the belts or straps and also to provide for an adjustable overall length thereof.

Accordingly, it is a general object of this invention to provide a new and improved buckle for releasably coupling two ends of a belt or the like and adapted to adjust the length of said belt, at least at one of said ends.

This side-release design may have been targeted at a budding outdoors audience, but the truth is, it was a concept that was useful everywhere. Later devices, like the fanny pack, relied upon it, and it’s heavily used in military settings. But it took time to sell it to audiences, because of the bad reputation that plastic had for reliability. Tracy ultimately got around this by pitching the buckles as “tough bucks” and taking the devices to tradeshows where he would have people attempt to break the designs with a hammer.

“I had a thousand dollars and one dollar bills. And I said, can you beat the buck for a buck? And I’d let ’em hammer it,” he recalled during the podcast. “If you could render it an operative, I would give you a dollar. Nobody did.”

Now, they’re used everywhere, likely because nobody’s been able to hammer it down since. The patents expired long ago, but if you’re looking for a lot of plastic side-release buckles, Illinois Tool Works, under its ITW Nexus brand, has them for days.