Whitcomb L. Judson Whitcomb L. Judson Whitcomb L. Judson (March 7, 1846 – December 7, 1909) was an American machine salesman, mechanical engineer and inventor. Judson invented the zipper in the 1890s. Judson was born in Chicago, Illinois. According to the 1860 census, he lived in Illinois, and served in the Union army. He enlisted in 1861 at Oneida, Illinois in the Forty-Second Illinois Cavalry. Judson attended Knox College in his hometown Galesburg, Illinois. He was found in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1886. In 1886 and 1887 the Minneapolis city directory identifies Judson as a "traveling agent" — a traveling salesman working probably for
Phoebe Judson grocer business. However, on January 16, 1864, Mexican bandits robbed the Corlisses, trapped them in their home, and burned them alive. The Judsons moved instead to Whidbey Island in 1866. Judson gave birth to Carrie Judson in 1869, but the child died of pertussis a month later. In 1871, Holden met James Alexander Patterson (brother of U.S. Senator David T. Patterson), a colonel who owned land adjacent to Squahalish, a Nooksack Indian camp in the Nooksack Valley of Whatcom County. Like many Washingtonian bachelors at the time, he had married an American Indian (a young Lummi princess known as Lizzie),