New technologies - even the most revolutionary ones - generally filter into society through a painstakingly slow evolutionary process.
Consider, for example, the lowly zipper. First patented in 1893 by Whitcomb Judson, the Clasp Locker was notoriously unreliable and expensive. But Judson and his backers kept the faith, and a design very much like the modern one was patented in 1917. There followed 20 years of marginal commercial success while the zipper was hawked as a novelty item - the Veg-O-Matic of the early 20th century, as historian Robert Friedel calls it. But in the 1930s, the zipper finally achieved success. A whole confluence of factors - declining costs of production, new buckling fashion trends, and a shift by zipper producers from retail promotion to trade marketing aimed at clothing manufacturers - finally pushed the revolutionary device into general use.
