Why do we say "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps"?

Meaning:

To succeed on your own

Background:

Traditionally, boots had a loop or tab, known as the bootstrap, at the top which the wearer used to pull the boot on.

While it is physically impossible to pull oneself up by the bootstrap, the metaphor has a long history dating back to at least the mid 19th century. Some sources point to The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen for the origin of the expression. These fanciful stories mostly based on folk tales were first published anonymously in the late 18th century. But actually, while the ever inventive Baron does pull himself and his horse out of a swamp by his own hair, we have been unable to find any reference to him pulling himself anywhere with his bootstraps.

What we do know is the expression can be found in an 1834 edition of The Workingman's Advocate (a radical newspaper first published in 1829 which folded in 1836 and made a brief comeback in 1844-1845): "It is conjectured that Mr. Murphee will now be enabled to hand himself over the Cumberland river or a barn yard fence by the straps of his boots."

Bootstrapping took on a new meaning in the early days of computers (or possibly in the early days of radio) to describe the process of loading a small amount of code to which was added progressively more complex code until the computer was ready for use. From this comes the term to "boot up" the computer.

Nowadays, there are many fewer bootstraps thanks to the invention of the zipper, the history of which is remarkably complex but essentially boils down to Gideon Sundback building on previous inventions to patent his own device in 1909; this was used for the first time in galoshes made by the B. F. Goodrich Company in 1923, who coined the term zipper.

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