Big Optimism: 'In Prague, you can trade them for a car'

At least, that's what the ad in 1995 said.

Jacob Davis was born Jacob Youphes in Riga, Latvia, in 1831. He emigrated to the United States, bounced between cities and trades, failed at a brewery in Reno, Nevada, and eventually opened a small tailor shop on Virginia Street. He made tents, horse blankets, and wagon covers for railroad workers. He bought his fabric from a dry goods merchant in San Francisco named Levi Strauss.

In 1870, a woman came into his shop. Her husband — a woodcutter known around Reno as Alkali Ike — kept destroying his pants, and she wanted a pair that would hold together. Davis had copper rivets on his workbench, left over from a horse blanket he’d been repairing. He put them at the stress points — the corners of the pockets, the base of the button fly. The pants held.

Word got around and Davis started getting more orders than he could handle. He knew he had something, and he knew he couldn’t afford the $68 patent filing fee. So in 1872, he wrote a letter to his fabric supplier in San Francisco — in the best English he could manage, which was not quite standard:

”The secrett of them Pants is the Rivits that I put in those Pockots and I found the demand so large that I cannot make them fast enough.

My nabors are getting yealouse of these success and unless I secure it by Patent Papers it will soon become to be a general thing everybody will make them up and thare will be no money in it.”

He proposed splitting the patent fee and sharing the rights. Levi Strauss wrote back immediately: Yes.

Let’s talk about Strauss. He’d been born Loeb Strauss in Buttenheim, Bavaria, in 1829. He came to New York at 18 after his father died, and in 1853 made his way to San Francisco — not to mine, but to sell to the people who were mining. By the time Davis’s letter arrived, he was prosperous, well-established, and a man who recognized a good idea when he saw one.

On May 20, 1873, 153 years ago this week, the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 139,121 — officially for “an Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings” — to Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss and Company. Davis moved to San Francisco to run the factory. He designed the double-arch stitching on the back pockets that became a registered trademark — the oldest apparel trademark still in use today. They called the pants “waist overalls.” Nobody called them jeans yet.

For the next 60 years, that’s essentially what they remained — workwear. Miners, cowboys, and railroad crews wore them. During the 1930s, jeans moved from the Sears catalogue onto the pages of Vogue. During World War II, soldiers wore them off-duty. A pair of Levi’s became one of the most coveted items American GIs could trade in occupied Europe.

Then Marlon Brando wore them in The Wild One in 1953. James Dean wore them in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. Overnight, jeans became the unofficial uniform of juvenile delinquency — and high schools across America banned them. The ban made them irresistible. By 1958 a newspaper report estimated that 90 percent of American teenagers wore jeans everywhere except bed and church.

The civil rights movement claimed them too — not the hippies, though they came later, but the Black college students who rode south to organize protests, deliberately wearing denim as a symbol of solidarity with the Southern Black working class. By 1969, a trade publication noted: “What has happened to denim in the last decade is really a capsule of what happened to America. It has climbed the ladder of taste.”

Behind the Iron Curtain, they were contraband — a symbol of everything the Soviet state was not. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the young people dismantling the first bricks were photographed in blue jeans. When Russian citizens could finally buy Levi’s legally, one customer wrote to the company: “A man hasn’t very many happy minutes in his life, but every happy moment remains in his memory for a long time. The buying of Levi’s 501 jeans is one of such moments in my life.”

In 1995, Levi’s ran a television commercial set in Prague — black and white, no dialogue, a young man navigating city streets in a Trabant he’s clearly still getting used to, near-misses and all.

At the end he pulls up to a group of friends, gets out — he’s in his boxer shorts — and they all pile in and drive away. The announcer delivers the tagline: “Reason Number 007: In Prague, you can trade them for a car.”

It was a joke. Mostly.

(As a card-carrying member of Generation X, I remembered this commercial instantly when I realized the Levi’s anniversary this week.)

Jacob Davis worked at the factory until his death in 1908, his name largely forgotten for most of the following century.

Then in 1974 an archivist at the National Archives came across a transcript from a 100-year-old court case in which Davis testified to how it all happened. In 2006, a historical marker was placed at the site of his tailor shop on Virginia Street in Reno. Strauss, as far as anyone can tell, never set foot in the city.

Two immigrants. Between them they invented the most democratic garment in human history. The company does $6 billion in annual revenue, sells in more than 110 countries, and its name is on the stadium where the San Francisco 49ers play.

Not bad for a letter written in broken English by a tailor who couldn’t afford a filing fee.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 17: “If the red and green images had been as fully photographed as the blue, it would have been a truly-coloured image of the ribbon.” — James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist, commenting on the imperfect but world-changing result of the first color photograph, demonstrated on this day in 1861 at the Royal Institution in London.

• May 18: “I’d get two chances — just two — to set my record because that’s all the fuel the plane could carry.” — Jacqueline Cochran, from her autobiography, recalling the morning of this day in 1953 when she climbed into a borrowed Canadian Air Force F-86 Sabre jet at Rogers Dry Lake, California, and became the first woman to break the sound barrier.

• May 19: “It has swept away forever the age-old barriers of time and distance.” — Juan Trippe, founder of Pan American World Airways, describing what transatlantic air service meant to the world — service he launched on this day in 1939 when the Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper departed Port Washington, New York, under Captain Arthur LaPorte on the first scheduled transatlantic airmail flight in history.

• May 20: “To afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” — Abraham Lincoln, from his message to Congress on July 4, 1861 — words he made concrete on this day in 1862 when he signed the Homestead Act, opening 160 acres of public land to any American citizen willing to farm it for five years and pay an $18 filing fee.

• May 21: “You must never think of anything except the need, and how to meet it.” — Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, which held its first official meeting on this day in 1881 at her apartment in Washington, D.C.

• May 22: “If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats, we will never achieve any progress.” — Richard Nixon, to Leonid Brezhnev at the opening of summit talks in Moscow on this day in 1972 — to which Brezhnev replied, with a laugh: “They would simply bury us in paper.” Nixon, who had built his career as America’s most fervent anti-communist, spent eight days negotiating with the Soviets and came home with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the first Strategic Arms Limitations agreement.

• May 23: “By this means, as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper glasses being always ready.” — Benjamin Franklin, writing to his friend George Whatley on this day in 1785, describing what he called his “double spectacles,” or what we now think of as bifocals.