Levi Strauss Sold the Fabric. A Latvian Tailor Invented the Rivets — and Couldn't Afford the Patent Fee.

US139121 was granted on May 20, 1873, to Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss & Company. The title is "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings." The improvement is a small copper rivet, and it is the reason blue jeans exist as a distinct garment rather than as ordinary work trousers.

Davis was a Latvian-born tailor working in Reno, Nevada, making tents, wagon covers, and heavy work clothes for miners and laborers. He bought his cloth from a San Francisco dry goods wholesaler named Levi Strauss.

His problem was a warranty problem. Working men kept returning trousers with the pockets torn out. The failure was always at the same place — the top corners of the pocket, where the whole weight of a load of tools, ore samples, or coins concentrates on a few stitches. No thread was strong enough.

The rivet

The fix came, by the usual account, from a customer's request for exceptionally durable trousers. Davis had copper rivets on hand for securing straps on horse blankets, and he hammered them into the stress points at the pocket corners and at the base of the button fly.

Metal does not tear the way stitching does. The rivets took the load off the thread entirely, and the trousers stopped coming back.

Word spread among laborers fast enough that Davis could not keep up with demand — and fast enough that other tailors began copying him.

Sixty-eight dollars

Davis wanted a patent and could not afford one. The filing fee was sixty-eight dollars, which he did not have.

So in 1872 he wrote to Levi Strauss, his fabric supplier, proposing that Strauss pay the fee in exchange for a share of the patent. Strauss — who was a merchant, not an inventor, and who had never made a pair of trousers in his life — recognized what he was looking at and agreed immediately.

The patent issued the following year in both names. Davis moved to San Francisco to run manufacturing. The garment they produced under it, in heavy denim dyed with indigo, became the "waist overall," then the blue jean.

Who gets remembered

The company bore Strauss's name, and popular memory credits him as the inventor of blue jeans. He was not. He was the man with the fabric, the distribution, and the sixty-eight dollars — which turned out to be exactly the three things the invention needed and did not have.

Davis worked for the company for the rest of his life and is comparatively little known outside denim history. The patent expired in 1890, at which point every manufacturer in America was free to rivet pockets, and most immediately did.

The rivets are still there. Look at the corners of your back pockets.

See the original

The full text and figures of US139121 are on patents.us.