Born in the tiny town of Saint-Saphorin-sur-Morges in 1907, George de Mestral filed his first patent at the age of 12, for a toy airplane. “He was driven to invent,” says Fraser Cameron, president and CEO of the modern-day Velcro Companies. But it wasn’t until his mid-30s that de Mestral hit upon the idea that eventually took over the world — though it would take more than two decades for his invention to finally stick.