Velcro
De Mestral gave the name "Velcro", a portmanteau of the French words "velour" ("velvet") and "crochet" ("hook"), to his invention as well as his company, which continues to manufacture and market the fastening system.
Science and technology in Venezuela
(1743, Calabozo – 1814, Camaguán) is probably the first outstanding inventor that Venezuela had. Alexander von Humboldt mentions a meeting with this man in 1800 cite:"We found in Calabozo, in the heart of the plains, an electric machine of large disks, electrophores, batteries, electrometers, a material almost as complete as that of our physicists in Europe. All these objects had not been purchased in the United States; Were the work of a man who had never seen any instrument, which no one could consult, who did not know the phenomena of electricity more than by reading the Treaty of Sigaud de Lafond (Joseph Aignan Sigaud de Lafond) and the Memoirs of Franklin (Benjamin Franklin)." Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.
In 1804 participated with the Spanish scientist Francisco Javier Balmis in the vaccination against smallpox in Venezuela. Del Pozo was a partisan of the Spanish colonial government and for this reason he received no support from the new independist government established in 1811. He died forgotten in 1814.
Luis Zambrano (Bailadores, 1901 – Tovar, 1990) was a Venezuelan self-taught inventor and popular technologist. He left formal education after the fourth year of primary school, but soon began to develop an interest in mechanics, enjoying discovering for himself the speed ratios produced by connecting oranges of different diameters and rotating them by means of jets of water. These gadgets lead him to consider new challenges and discover of physical principles in practical ways. In his Valle Nuevo workshop, near Bailadores, he empirically and intuitively learned enough about water turbines to generate electricity and mechanics to allow him to create about 50 inventions, some of which were commissions, such as a strawberry-peeling machine and a sieve for categorising garlic, and numerous improvements to various different machines, despite having lost his right hand to a saw in an accident in 1977. In November 1984, the University of Los Andes awarded him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa "for his useful creative work", the first time that this award had been given to a country man. He was declared an illustrious son of Bailadores, and a street in this Méridan village is now named after him.