Levi Strauss: The Peddler Who Never Invented Blue Jeans

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The name on your jeans belongs to a man who did not invent them. Levi Strauss was born Loeb Strauss in Buttenheim, Bavaria, in February 1829, and came to New York at 18 with his mother and two sisters. His brothers Jonas and Louis ran a wholesale dry goods business on Liberty Street, and he began as a peddler, carrying kettles, blankets, and sewing supplies door to door. It was hard labor, and it taught him what working people wanted most from the things they bought: that they last.

This episode follows him to San Francisco, where he arrived in March 1854 after crossing Panama and opened Levi Strauss and Co. as a wholesale importer. While prospectors gambled on gold, he sold them clothing, bedding, tents, combs, and handkerchiefs. Then a customer changed everything. Jacob W. Davis, a tailor in Reno, Nevada, had found a way to stop work pants from tearing, and he needed a partner with money and reach to patent it.

• Davis reinforced pocket corners and the base of the button fly with copper rivets in 1871, so the metal took the strain instead of the thread.
• He wrote to Strauss in 1872 asking for help with the patent. It was issued in 1873, with one half assigned to Levi Strauss and Co.
• Strauss never married. When he died in San Francisco in September 1902 at 73, his estate of roughly $30 million passed to his nephews, whose descendants still own the company.
• He helped establish Congregation Emanu-El, the first synagogue in San Francisco, funded orphan charities, and in 1897 endowed 28 scholarships at the University of California, Berkeley.
• A 1960 episode of Death Valley Days called The Million Dollar Pants gave him an invented romance and replaced Jacob Davis with a fictional character named Patrick Mahoney.