Whitcomb L. Judson

Whitcomb L. Judson was an American machine salesman, mechanical engineer and inventor who lived from 1843 to 1909. He received thirty patents over a sixteen-year career, fourteen of them on pneumatic street railway innovations, and six of those concerned a motor mechanism suspended beneath the rail car that functioned with compressed air. He founded the Judson Pneumatic Street Railway. He is most noted for his invention of the zip fastener, which he first called a clasp-locker; its first application was as a fastener for shoes and high boots.