The Zipper
Whitcomb Judson patented it -- but the man who actually made it work spent a decade fixing his mistake, and neither of them named it.
In 1893, at the Chicago World's Fair, engineer Whitcomb Judson unveiled his 'clasp-locker' -- a row of hooks and eyes yanked together by a sliding clasp, meant to replace the tedious button-hook boots of the era. Visitors walked past it without much interest, and the mechanism jammed constantly.
Judson never fixed it. That job fell to Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American engineer hired by Judson's own company, who spent years redesigning the mechanism from the ground up. Sundback ditched the hooks entirely for interlocking teeth, precisely spaced, engaging and releasing in one continuous motion, and patented the 'Separable Fastener' in 1917.
It still didn't have a name people wanted to say out loud. That arrived in 1923, when B.F. Goodrich put Sundback's fastener on a new line of rubber galoshes and someone in marketing noticed the sound it made -- a quick, satisfying zzzip -- and called them Zipper Boots. Judson had been dead for over a decade by then.
Whitcomb Judson did not invent the zipper as we know it -- he invented an unreliable hook fastener that failed commercially, and Gideon Sundback's later redesign is the mechanism actually in use today.