Walter Hunt’s greatest invention. A single factory today can churn out a billion safety pins in one year.
Walter Hunt’s greatest invention. A single factory today can churn out a billion safety pins in one year.
If Walter Hunt was not the most prolific inventor in the first decades of the United States, he was surely the most maddening. No doubt, the list of what he dreamed up has left generations of would-be magnates foaming at the mouth over what they would have done with Hunt’s many inventions, any one of which might have made him a fortune.
Hunt has been described as “a Yankee mechanical genius,” though perhaps a mechanical Forrest Gump would be closer to the mark. Good-natured, philanthropic, and always caring, he was one of thirteen children born to Quaker parents in 1796, in the little upstate New York town of Martinsburg. Taught in a one-room schoolhouse, he is reported to have earned “a degree in masonry,” although where he would have done that or what it would have meant in the early nineteenth century remains mysterious.
Hunt might have been content to spend his whole life outside of Lowville, another small Lewis County town, farming to support his wife and four children, but the local flax mill—where a brother worked—got into trouble. Hunt responded by inventing a better spinning and roping machine that he let mill owner Willis Hoskins and his associate, Ziba Knox, take out the patent on. Well, how can a man deny anything to someone named Ziba Knox? Not long after, in 1826, Hoskins was threatening to slash all his workers’ wages because his mill was floundering again. Hunt talked him down and invented a still better flax spinner for him, although this time, in an inexplicable burst of self-interest, he patented it for himself and set off with his family to try his luck in New York City.
On his first day in the big city, Hunt watched a young girl run down in the street by Manhattan traffic that was even more murderous than it is now. Shaken, he promptly invented and patented a metal gong alarm that coach drivers could operate with their feet, rather than having to take their hands off the reins to blow a horn. He then sold the device to a manufacturer for a pittance.
So it would go, Hunt inventing one incredibly useful and commercial device after another in the little machine shop he kept in an alley off Abingdon Square. A knife sharpener, with a safety guard—Hunt, unlike everyone else in nineteenth-century America, was all about safety first—that could replace the huge, traditional grindstones that were too big for apartment living. A rope-making machine. Castor globes (those little luggage wheels) for moving furniture. A coal stove that distributed its heat equally in all directions. And more: an iceboat, a saw, a conical bullet, a revolver, a breech-loading, repeating rifle (see Mobile Warfare: The Repeating Rifle); several bicycles, a paper shirt collar, a nail-making machine, a flexible spring attachment for belts and suspenders, hobnails for boots and shoes, bottle stoppers, a safety lamp, a “ceiling-walking device” for the circus, an inkstand, and the modern fountain pen. Some twenty-eight patents in his lifetime, each one them capable of making an antebellum American leap up and say, “Hell, yeah! Why didn’t somebody think of that already?”
Yet what Hunt invented he didn’t always patent, what he patented he usually sold for a small flat fee to pay some pressing debt, and what he hung on to he rarely bothered to exploit. The most notorious case was the flawed but novel sewing machine (see “The Song of the Shirt”: The Sewing Machine Wars) that he invented. First he sold the rights to a manufacturer, who could not raise the money to market it. Then he decided to shelve the whole project because his fifteen-year-old daughter, Caroline, convinced him that it would put seamstresses out of work. (The truth would be exactly the opposite.)
Even as his family fell in and out of debt, Hunt seemed to prefer working on rather nauseatingly precious paintings of puppies, ponies, and other farm animals and speculating in land along the Hudson River to doing anything with his inventions. (Perhaps the greatest mystery of Walter Hunt is why he thought he had the business head for being a real estate mogul.)
By 1848 Hunt found himself in debt again, owing fifteen dollars to a draftsman named Jonathan Chapin. Hunt being Hunt, he went to see Chapin, who, far from pressing him for the cash, offered to loan him more. Hunt, in despair, refused—then looked at the length of brass wire he had been twisting about in his agony. Eureka! Hunt hustled back to his machine shop, bent the pin around, and invented the safety pin.
Paleontologists would estimate that some form of safety pin or another had been around since the Neolithic Period. Yet somehow man had never got it right—until Walter Hunt. His was a masterpiece of simplicity. He shaped the very first safety pin with a completely shielded point and a spring action to tuck it easily inside the guard. He then hurried out to a manufacturer named Jonathan Richardson and offered to sell it to him for $400. Richardson agreed—if Hunt went to the time and expense of patenting it and gave him all rights. Ecstatic, Hunt said yes, and rushed back to Chapin to give him his fifteen dollars. Fortunately, he did not encounter anyone offering to sell him magic beans along the way.
Hunt would expire of pneumonia in his Abingdon Square workshop in 1859 at age sixty-three. Before he went, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that Isaac Singer, wrapping up all loose ends in the epic sewing machine patent battle, had agreed to pay him $50,000. In 1875, the Union Paper Collar Company also agreed to pay his son, George W. Hunt, $5,000 plus court expenses in cash, $50,000 in company stock, and 10 percent of all royalties for the paper collar Walter had invented.
Or maybe, for Walter Hunt, who was never heard to complain or bemoan his luck, the satisfaction came in the work. Babies all over the world, at least, would be eternally grateful.
the genius details
The ancient Greeks and Romans used a sort of safety pin, called a “fibula,” or brooch. Etruscans and Persians also used some variety of this. But no previous pin had Hunt’s clasp-and-spring action.
Hunt did not come up with the name safety pin but filed his invention patent as “a new and useful Improvement in the Make or Form of Dress-Pins.”
Made mostly out of steel in the nineteenth century, safety pins today are made out of cheaper brass, sometimes with a chrome coating.
In India, safety pins and sewing needles are often passed down over generations.
Hunt’s device for helping circus performers to walk upside down would still be in use in 1937, roughly a hundred years later.
The classic design that was the 1854 Singer sewing machine.
People have been sewing ever since the last Ice Age, twenty thousand years ago, when they used bone needles to bind skins and furs together. Over all the millennia that followed, no one came up with a significantly better process; even Leonardo Da Vinci tried and failed.
Beginning in 1755, a number of European inventors began devising one form of sewing machine or another, but they never caught on. This was for many reasons, but the main failing was that none of the machines succeeded in making more than a simple, weak “chain stitch” that would easily tear out.
This changed in 1834, when Walter Hunt invented a device that contained all the basic elements of the modern sewing machine in his Manhattan shop. Hunt, a sort of business idiot savant (see Mobile Warfare: The Repeating Rifle), refused to even patent his sewing machine because his fifteen-year-old daughter was afraid it would put seamstresses out of work.
A few years later, Elias Howe took up the quest. He came from a family with a long history of invention but was put to work on the family farm at six and was rented out to work a neighbor’s fields by eleven. Married by twenty-two, with children soon on the way, he worked full-time for nine dollars a week while spending his spare time trying to make a sewing machine. A school chum backed him with tools and a small annex to his house to use as a workroom, and after four years and forty prototypes Howe completed a patent model.
The eye of Howe’s machine needle was at the point of the needle, not the top. As it plunged forward, into the fabric, another thread, held on a metal shuttle, passed through the loop in the first thread. The needle then retracted, pulling the threads together into a sturdy “lock stitch.”
Howe had succeeded where Da Vinci had failed. Once he had his patent, he tried to publicize his new machine, holding a public contest at Boston’s Quincy Market in which he competed against five women seamstresses. Howe’s machine completed 250 to 300 stitches a minute without breaking a thread, while the women could hand-sew no more than 40. Still, there were no takers. His invention cost a hefty $300, and it had a balky feed—probably thanks to the fact that the material was fed in vertically and held by a delicate set of pins, while the needles worked horizontally.
Howe took his invention to England for the next three years, where he was bamboozled like the Yankee rube he was. Receiving word that his wife was dying, he sold the latest version of his sewing machine and his papers to get passage back to New York. He made it to his wife’s deathbed just in time—only to get word that another ship, carrying the last of his possessions, had sunk off Cape Cod.
Yet unbeknownst to Howe, while he was in England, other American inventors had done much of his work for him, dramatically improving his machine. Chief among them was one Isaac Merritt Singer, as great a cad as the ranks of American inventors have ever produced. The son of poor German immigrants from upstate New York, Singer ran away from the family farm at age eleven to join a traveling stage act. He would perform as an actor for years, off and on the stage, a real-life Falstaff.
Yet in his peripatetic existence Singer had acquired considerable mechanical ability and business acumen. Invited to work on another inventor’s sewing machine, he made critical improvements to it over a few months of feverish round-the-clock work. Most crucially, he mounted the machine on a table and reversed its direction: the fabric would be fed in horizontally, held by a metal plate, and operated by a foot treadle instead of the hand crank that Howe and all previous sewing machine inventors had used. The needle would be held by a fixed arm and would now move vertically, striking down, while a falling shuttle, beneath the plate, would feed the “locking” thread into the stitch.
Maneuvering in his usual fashion, Singer cheated and bullied his two backers into surrendering their rights, then used all his showmanship to market the device he now owned—often singing the mournful ode to the sewing girl’s life “The Song of the Shirt” while exhibiting his work. Rival companies and inventors kept popping up everywhere, but Singer seemed to enjoy fighting them off.
Then Elias Howe showed up, demanding Singer pay him $25,000 for the rights to his patent. It was cheap at a hundred times the price, but Singer responded by threatening to kick Howe down the steps of his shop. He had misjudged his man. Broke and struggling to raise his three young, motherless children, Howe took Singer to court, waging a five-year legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court—where he won.
The judgment seemed to sober Singer, who by now had a partner: a cold, calculating lawyer named Edward Clark who had helped him cheat his old collaborators. The sewing machine business was already sliding toward anarchy, with the leading companies engaged in more suing than sewing—what the newspapers labeled “the Sewing Machine Wars.”
A grand compromise was reached: the seven leading manufacturers would pool all patents and put fifteen dollars for each machine sold into the “Great Sewing Machine Combination.” Howe would get five dollars on every sale—something that made him a very rich man.
It was a cartel, but one in which the members went on competing. Singer kept turning out machines that were lighter and cheaper, able to sew every possible kind of stitch in every possible kind of garment. When scandals in his personal life (mistresses, multiple wives, illegitimate children, wife- and child-beating, for starters) chased him to Europe, Clark’s savvy business innovations kept the Singers selling.
The sewing machine would become ubiquitous in households, cutting the time women put into sewing for their families by nine-tenths. Singers—handsome, black, embossed machines in their felt-lined cases—could be found everywhere in homes into the 1970s.
Contrary to the fears of Hunt’s daughter, the sewing machine created countless new jobs. Ready-to-wear garments democratized clothing in the United States, leaving European visitors marveling at how (relatively) well the working and middle classes dressed. They enabled millions of immigrant women to break out of the household by the turn of the century, carting their light, affordable machines around to factories and sweatshops. There they worked under horrible conditions, making what were barely survival wages. But in response these now independent women would form one of America’s most powerful unions, transforming their own lives and the nation they lived in.
the genius details
According to Godey’s Lady’s Book, it would take a skilled seamstress (or housewife) about fourteen hours to make a man’s dress shirt and ten hours to sew a simple dress by hand. With the sewing machine, these times would drop to one and a quarter hours and one hour, respectively.
Howe’s original price for his sewing machine, $300, would be about $14,000 in today’s money.
The Singer Sewing Company introduced the first electric sewing machines in 1889.
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was formed in 1900, with thirty dollars and two thousand members, most of them women.
Madame Demorest’s Fashion sense
The full hoop skirt of the 1850s conceals Madame Demorest’s “imperial dress elevator,” an array of weighted strings and loops inside that allowed women to subtly raise the hem of their dresses while crossing the street.
Long before the devil wore Prada, long before Donna Karan or Vera Wang or Diane von Furstenberg, Madame Demorest was telling American women how to dress and bringing the fashions of the world to their sewing rooms. At the same time, she was busy trying to abolish slavery, win equal rights for women and people of color, and stamp out drinking.
Ellen Louise Curtis was born in the New York village of Schuylerville in 1824. When she turned eighteen, her father, a hat factory owner, helped her set up a millinery shop in what was then the spa resort of Saratoga Springs. The shop was a success, and the intrepid Miss Curtis moved her business down to the much bigger town of New York City. There she met a widowed dry goods merchant, William Jennings Demorest, who had just opened “Madame Demorest’s Emporium of Fashion” on lower Broadway. Ellen soon took up the role of Madame Demorest, both in the shop and in reality.
From the beginning, “Nell,” as she was known, had that rare sense for fashion that, through the years, only the top designers and arbiters of style have possessed. She knew both what women wanted and what they should want, and she knew how to get it to them. Her designs included comfortable corsets—in an age of whalebone torture (see Embracing the Curves: Liberated by the Bra)—small hoop skirts, and, most ingeniously, “Mme. Demorest’s imperial dress elevators,” a set of weighted loop fasteners that enabled women to discreetly lift the corners of a full hoop skirt while passing over the prodigious piles of muck lying in wait off Manhattan curbs.
The invention that changed her life, though, sprang to mind one day when she watched her maid cutting dress patterns from brown wrapping paper. Why not have dress patterns printed on cheap tissue paper, which could then be sold to women all over the country at little cost? She quickly made this a reality—offering the patterns along with her “Excelsior” drafting system, a mathematical formula she invented with the help of her sister and husband, to enable women to adapt her patterns to any size or figure they pleased.
It was the right idea, at the right time. More women than ever were taking up dressmaking with the advent of the first sewing machines (see “The Song of the Shirt”: The Sewing Machine Wars). (Madame Demorest invented her own sewing machine, too: one that ran backward as well as forward.) The new railroads could rush paper patterns, selling for anywhere from twelve cents to a dollar apiece, to women all over the United States. “Elegantly trimmed” dresses, skirts, blouses; men’s and children’s and infants’ clothing—there was a pattern for everything. Dress sections—bodices, sleeves, mantles, basques—were sold separately so they could be used on whatever outfits women liked.
Soon Nell was traveling frequently to Europe and mailing the latest trends and fashions from Paris and London back to her sister Kate, now working as her chief stylist. She continued to design and make dresses herself, provided custom-made patterns at her top clients’ request, and added lines of lingerie, perfume, cosmetics, and sewing notions. She and her husband opened some three hundred satellite stores, “Madame Demorest’s Magasins des Modes,” and employed over 1,500 sales agents—almost all of them women—in cities around the United States, as well as in Canada, Europe, and Cuba.
For two extremely moral people, the Demorests possessed some Mad Men chops when it came to self-promotion. William Demorest started a series of immensely popular quarterly, then monthly, magazines that promoted women’s suffrage, civil rights, and temperance, alongside articles on fashion, plates of dress patterns, and sample paper patterns stapled into the binding. Nell published the annual Madame Demorest’s What to Wear and How to Make It, along with quarterly catalogues. She was always represented at the big European shows, installed a huge exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, and created a wedding trousseau and wardrobe for Lavinia Warren, whose marriage to her fellow circus “midget,” “General” Tom Thumb, was promoted by P. T. Barnum into a worldwide sensation. Her work drew praise everywhere.
“What Madame Demorest says is supreme law in the fashion realm of this country,” one rival admitted.
By 1876, Madame Demorest was selling over three million paper patterns annually in the United States and Europe, but her reign was already giving way to that of another industrious couple. Ebenezer and Ellen Augusta Pollard Butterick copied many of the Demorests’ promotion and distribution methods—even starting their own magazine, the Delineator—and patented their patterns, something the Demorests had neglected to do. More important, the Buttericks sold their patterns already fitted to many different sizes; no need to use Nell Demorest’s drafting system, no matter how brilliant it was.
The Demorests sold off their business in 1887. They had made a great deal of money and seemed just as content to devote themselves to their many social causes. In these, they had always been consistent when it came to business. Almost alone among large American companies in the nineteenth century, Mme. Demorest’s hired numerous blacks as well as whites for all business operations and treated them equally. If Nell’s clients objected, she told them they could go elsewhere. If her white employees objected, she fired them. She was, as in fashion, always a fearless trendsetter.
the genius details
Madame Demorest’s first known tissue-paper pattern, for a boy’s jacket, was stapled inside the pages of Frank Leslie’s Ladies’ Gazette. Demorest advertised in this publication and others, such as the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book.
The Demorests’ own monthly magazine, Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Madame Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions, eventually reached a circulation of one hundred thousand.
Ebenezer and Ellen Butterick began producing paper patterns in a wide variety of sizes in 1863, selling them out of their family home in Sterling, Massachusetts. The Buttericks’ monthly magazine, the Delineator, launched in 1873, would become the leading women’s fashion magazine in the country by the turn of the century.
By 1876, E. Butterick & Co. had one hundred branch offices and one thousand agencies throughout the United States and Canada. Butterick’s survives as a company to this day.
Pants for all seasons: copper-riveted jeans today.
They are an American icon, invented and marketed on the Western frontier by a pair of immigrants. A work garment turned fashion statement, jeans—formerly “blue jeans”—would become the favorite clothing of people all over the world, in every walk of life, though they had the humblest of origins.
Jacob Youphes started life as a subject of the czar, a tailor of German-Jewish extraction born in Riga, the capital of Latvia, then a province of the Russian Empire. Emigrating to the Lower East Side of New York at the age of twenty-three, he changed his name to Jacob Davis and led a peripatetic existence as a journeyman tailor, living in Maine, California, British Columbia, then Nevada. Along the way he also tried his hand at panning for gold, selling tobacco and foodstuffs, and finally investing his life’s savings in a Reno brewery. The business went belly up, leaving Jacob to fall back on his tailoring to support his wife and six children.
A lazy husband and his determined wife would give Davis a whole new opportunity. One day in 1870, a local woman asked him to make a pair of pants for her husband. It seemed that she wanted him to chop some wood, but he claimed to have no pants fit for the job. His wife gave Davis three dollars up front and told him to make the pants “strong” for her man, variously described as “very large” and “enormous.”
She had come to the right tailor. Davis of late had been specializing in making wagon covers and tents out of ten-ounce, white cotton duck cloth for a prosperous merchant in San Francisco named Levi Strauss. Cotton duck cloth was an incredibly tough fabric, but Davis also happened to have on hand some copper rivets, which he used to make straps on horse blankets for teamsters to use. He added them to the pants pockets for his corpulent client, just to make sure they wouldn’t tear.
The pants were an immediate success, and soon Davis was inundated with orders for his copper-riveted “waist overalls,” making some of them out of nine-ounce, blue denim material that he also got from Strauss. Western work tended to be hard outdoor work—digging mine shafts, breaking horses, driving cattle, pounding fence posts, standing for hours in freezing streams to fish or to sift for gold—and pants needed to be tough. The copper rivets also proved ideal, holding together pockets that were often stuffed with work tools.
Among his many talents, Davis was an inveterate inventor, and he saw the potential of what he had at once. But his English was still limited, and his initial patent application for the jeans was denied. Afraid that he would lose his idea altogether, something that had happened with an earlier invention, and hard-pressed to raise the sixty-eight dollars necessary for a new application, he wrote to his San Francisco contractor, who quickly agreed to share the patent with him.
Levi Strauss, also a German-Jewish immigrant, had emigrated from Bavaria the year before Davis came over. He had also changed his name, from Loeb to Levi, and had also moved about the country, working for his family’s dry goods business, first in New York City, then in Louisville, Kentucky, and California.
Strauss’s command of English and the American legal system seems to have been considerably more advanced than Davis’s at this time, and a less scrupulous man might well have seized the opportunity to file Davis’s patent for himself, and made a killing. Instead, Strauss invited Davis to San Francisco, where their partnership progressed rapidly, and Strauss soon shifted the whole orientation of his business from tents to pants. These were sewn first by women in their homes but then in a factory where Davis supervised some 450 workers. Their sole material soon became denim, which was shipped in by Strauss from the high-quality Amoskeag textile mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. Unlike cotton duck, denim becomes softer and more flexible with repeated wearing and washing.
By the time Davis and Strauss died, decades later, both were wealthy men. Leadership of their company passed to some of Strauss’s nephews and one of Davis’s sons, and both families are still making jeans to this day. But jeans remained pants worn mostly by working men and little boys until the 1940s, when Life magazine photographs of women students at Radcliffe wearing jeans shocked much of America. Soon a pair of cinematic rebels, Marlon Brando and James Dean, made jeans cool for the first time. It wasn’t long before jeans in every possible shape, size, color, and style—ripped, faded, stonewashed, black, blue, white, hip hugging, relaxed, flattering, comfortable, skinny, fat, boot, and bell-bottom—were sold everywhere.
Today, over 1.2 billion pairs of denim jeans are sold around the world every year—a $56 billion business. The average American owns seven pairs of jeans.
the genius details
Denim is a sturdy, cotton, warp-faced, twill textile. Traditionally, its warp threads were dyed in indigo and its weft threads were not, which is why most jeans look different inside and out.
The word denim is derived from serge de Nimes, or “fabric of Nimes.” The word jeans derives from the French word for Genoa, Italy—Genes—where the first denim pants were made.
The oldest extant pair of Levi’s jeans is from the 1880s and was found in an abandoned mine in Colorado. The Levi Strauss Company paid $25,000 for them, and collectors now search old mines for more discarded jeans from the nineteenth century.
In the 1870s, Davis added a double arch of stitching to the back of Levi’s jeans’ pockets to distinguish them from imitators. It is the oldest extant apparel trademark in America today.
The official name of Levi’s was changed from “waist overalls” to “jeans” in 1960.
Bohemian Caresse Crosby’s patented bra, first invented in 1910, freed women from the cruel constrictions of the corset and allowed them to move freely.
Mary Phelps “Polly” Jacob received the first patent for the modern brassiere in 1914. It was a propitious time for an unconventional woman, and her invention.
Variations on bras had existed for centuries in cultures all around the world. Major movements for “rational clothing” among women had sprung up in England and the United States in the 1800s, and the bandeau had begun to make real inroads in French fashion, always a trendsetter. Nonetheless, the whalebone (really “baleen”; see Power Plant at Sea: The Whaling Ship) and metal corset had reached new lows of constrictive cruelty by the turn of the century. Jacob, daughter of a blueblood American family that traced its roots back to the Mayflower and to steamboat inventor Robert Fulton, was sick and tired of this underwear armor that tortured her buxom figure. Preparing for a friend’s debutante ball one night in 1910 when she was still just nineteen, she had her maid bring her two pocket handkerchiefs and some pink ribbon. Together they sewed up what Jacob would call the “Backless Brassiere.”
The bra was an instant success, allowing Jacob to move around the dance floor with unprecedented grace and freedom. All her friends wanted one, and a family lawyer persuaded her to file for a patent, where she described her invention as “well adapted to women of different size” and “so efficient that it may be worn by persons engaged in violent exercises like tennis.”
By 1920, Jacob had founded the Fashion Form Brassiere Company, after having to make the formal declaration that she was a married woman using funds separate from her husband’s bank account. She opened a two-woman factory on Boston’s Washington Street and managed to sell a few hundred bras to local department stores, but the business never really took off—perhaps in part because she also used her shop as a trysting place with an extramarital lover. Jacob happily sold her patent for $1,500 to the Warner Brothers Corset Company in Connecticut, which soon discontinued her model but used the patent to make an estimated $15 million.
Jacob never looked back. After losing her first husband to alcoholism, she married the wealthy, erratic, and mystical dilettante Harry Crosby, a man six years her younger, and moved with him to France, where she changed her name to “Caresse Crosby.” The two of them put the “Lost” into the Lost Generation with a spree of extraordinary libertinage—in between supporting most of the leading artists of their time.
“I can’t say the bra will ever take as great place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it,” she would write in her memoir, where it was, unsurprisingly, a bit of a footnote.
An altogether more serious couturier was Ida “Itel” Rosenthal, née Kaganovich, born near Minsk in 1886, who like so many young Jewish women of that time and place was taught to sew at a young age by her mother. Fleeing the Russian Empire with her fiancé, William Rosenthal, after their involvement in the failed revolution of 1905, she went to work for herself as a dressmaker in their small Hoboken apartment. There she raised and supported two children and her husband as he struggled through different tuberculosis sanatoriums.
Over the course of fourteen years, she built up a two-story sweatshop, with fifteen workers in their house, then moved the business across the Hudson to West Harlem. There, in 1921, she partnered with Enid Bissett, a former vaudevillian who was running an upscale dress shop on West Fifty-Seventh Street. Neither liked the way bras of the time fit or how they spoiled the way their dresses looked on customers.
Corsets were now fully on the way out—as chairman of the War Industries Board, Bernard Baruch had implored women to give up their corsets and had claimed their dedication to the war effort saved twenty-eight thousand tons of steel, or enough to make a battleship—but the “flapper” look that replaced them in the 1920s proved to be just one more example of men deciding what they thought women should look like at any given moment.
“It was a sad story. Women wore those flat things like bandages,” Rosenthal later told a reporter. “A towel with hooks in the back. And the companies used to advertise, ‘Look like your brother.’ Well, that’s not possible. Why fight nature?”
To drive home their point, the two women offered a brand of bra called “Maidenform,” at Bissett’s suggestion, in direct contrast to a popular flapper bra known, believe it or not, as “Boyishform.” Bissett and Rosenthal began to make modern bras out of soft-knit mesh, with pockets and uplift. They were so good, in contrast to the rather crude, bosom-crushing garments that went before them, that soon the women’s dress customers were asking for extra bras to go with their outfits. During the endless hours of enforced rest in his sanatoriums, William Rosenthal had spent hours sculpting women’s bodies with clay—something he also did, almost compulsively, on beaches with sand—and now he was able to make bras for all shapes and sizes.
Itel Rosenthal handled all the rest of the business, eventually buying out Bissett when she wanted to retire and bringing her daughter, Beatrice, and son-in-law, Joseph Coleman, into the company. She made them both learn the business from the ground up. Beatrice proved as capable an administrator as her mom, while Joseph was smart enough to snap up an ad campaign that another woman pioneer, Mary Filius, conceived, the famous “I dreamed I . . . last night, in my Maidenform bra,” a racy (for the time) series of magazine ads that stressed the product’s comfort and ease in wearing.
If it wasn’t the steamboat, a Maidenform bra was bought by one in every five American women, and the company reported $100 million in sales by 1980. It employed five thousand people at twenty-eight American locations and sold product in 115 countries. The company stayed in the extended Rosenthal family until 1998.
the genius details
“Caresse” and Harry Crosby bought Henri Cartier-Bresson his first camera. They also founded Black Sun Press, which published seminal works by William Faulkner, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Henry Miller, and others in affordable paperback editions.
Following Harry Crosby’s death in a suicide pact with a lover, Caresse kept Black Sun going for a few more years; wrote pornography with Anaïs Nin; took on another younger, drunken, troubled husband; ran artistic and literary salons; tried to start a world peace center; and published Portfolio: An International Quarterly, which published Man Ray, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Max Ernst and artwork by Picasso and Dalí.
Itel Rosenthal started as a seamstress in America with a Singer Sewing Machine (see “The Song of the Shirt”: The Sewing Machine Wars) that she bought on an installment plan.
It was William Rosenthal who, for his wife’s company, came up with the modern lettered sizes for bra cups.
During World War II, Maidenform made bras for the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), parachutes for the US Army Air Force, and vests for messenger pigeons.
The modern dry-cleaning machine, a miracle of recycling, with its closed system capturing most of the solvent it uses.
How to keep one’s clothing clean without shrinking or ruining it is a concern that goes back at least to the Romans and probably the ancient Greeks. The Romans hit upon the idea of weaving what we call fuller’s earth—claylike earth, with traces of alkaline and other chemicals—right into their woolen togas. Togas were also cleaned in part with combinations of lye and ammonia. The ammonia was collected from the urine of farm animals—or friends, Romans, and countrymen. Outside public latrines were special pots, thoughtfully left there by the local fullonicae, the laundries that were often the biggest employer in any district and were owned by wealthy and prominent men. Fullers’ guilds soon abounded, and the government taxed the collection of urine, which provided a steady stream of income.
Over the next two thousand years or so, people evolved to the point where they didn’t necessarily have to dunk their finest garments in their own pee. By the late seventeenth century, launderers were using kerosene—also known as “white naphtha” or “coal oil”—spirits of turpentine, and related substances, all of which were very good at getting out oil-based stains, and exploding into flames. Clothes were simply washed in vats of this stuff, then hung out to dry, leaving your clothes smelling like a barbeque, among other things. Dry-cleaning plants were considered so dangerous that almost no one would insure them, and dry cleaners began the custom of accepting your dirty clothes in little shops, then sending them off to plants far from where anyone lived.
In 1821, a thirty-year-old New Yorker named Thomas L. Jennings became the first African American ever to be granted a US patent, for a new dry-cleaning process he called “dry scouring.” It was no small feat for a black man to make his way in the New York City of the time, where slavery was still legal until 1827 and people of color were frequently subjected to abuse and violence. The very fact of his winning a patent raised a hue and cry, for it was against the law for a “slave” to own any such thing. What the white supremacists didn’t know was that Jennings had been born to free parents. He became a tailor and was apparently so talented that he had his own shop on Church Street, in Lower Manhattan, catering to an upper-class clientele.
Noticing that many of his customers were irate over stains that ruined their clothes, Jennings came up with dry scouring. Little is known about this process—its secret was lost in a fire in 1836—but it must have worked. Jennings reportedly became rich. He bought his wife and her family out of bondage and devoted most of the money he made to the fight for freedom and civil rights.
Thomas and Elizabeth Jennings’s daughter, also Elizabeth, would anticipate Rosa Parks by over a hundred years, when she was forcibly ejected from a horse-drawn Manhattan streetcar—after a prolonged physical struggle—by a conductor and a policeman in 1854. Elizabeth, a schoolteacher on her way to play the organ at her church when she was ejected, sued the Third Avenue Railroad Company, and won $272.50 in costs and damages—and more important, the desegregation of all the company’s streetcars. Her case, funded by her father, was handled by future US president Chester Allan Arthur. Elizabeth Jennings would go on to a long career in education, starting New York’s first kindergarten for black children in her home.
Gasoline and other inflammables would join kerosene as “cleansers” by the turn of the century. But by the 1920s, William Joseph Stoddard, a dry cleaner in Atlanta, had combined with Lloyd E. Jackson, a scientist at the Mellon Institute, to come up with “Stoddard Solvent,” a somewhat less volatile, petroleum-based “white spirit” that would soon become the leading dry-cleaning solvent and would remain so for over thirty years.
The dry-cleaning industry, though, had also begun to diversify into chlorinated solvents—thanks in part to government research efforts aimed at producing poison gas during World War I. By the 1940s, one of the new solvents, tetrachloroethylene, better known as perchloroethylene, or “perc,” was being used more and more. Perc proved to be stable, much less prone to explode in flames, and easy on your silk underwear.
It is also, alas, a carcinogen. This does not mean you are in any danger simply by wearing dry-cleaned clothes, mostly because all but infinitesimal traces of perc are removed from them before they come back to you.
But the process, like all dry-cleaning processes, is not dry. Your clothes were and are cleaned in what is usually a sort of combination industrial washing-drying machine. First they’re washed in one chamber full of liquid perc, along with water, a little detergent, and other specialized cleaning solvents. They are then air-dried in a second chamber, with the perc evaporating into vapors that are condensed and collected, while—nowadays—computer sensors confirm that it has been removed.
For decades, this was all done in a “vented” system, in which fumes were released freely into the air—or into the lungs of laundry workers. All dry-cleaning plants now use “closed” systems, in which nearly all the perc solvent is recaptured and reused over and over again as it changes from a liquid, to a gas, to a solid, and back.
Even so, concerns over perc causing cancers in exposed workers, and of contaminated wastewater slipping into drinking supplies, led California to ban perc by 2023, setting off a scramble by dry cleaners to find a replacement. A wide variety are already being tried, ranging from glycol ethers to hydrocarbon, liquid silicone to liquid carbon dioxide, and modified hydrocarbon blends to brominated solvents. All have their advantages and disadvantages when it comes to both the environment and getting out those pesky, congealed blood splatter stains. Maybe if someone could turn up Thomas Jennings’s old patent. . . .
the genius details
Surviving photographs of Thomas Jennings’s dry-scouring machine show it resembling an iron presser.
Clothes are usually dry-cleaned at 86 degrees Fahrenheit and air-dried at 140 to 145 degrees Fahrenheit.
Modern machines recover 99.99 percent of all solvent used.
Between 2006 and 2011, the dry-cleaning industry averaged annual revenues of $7.5 billion and included twenty-two thousand businesses, employing some 150,000 workers.
Extensive research involving perc was done during World War I. At temperatures over 600 degrees Fahrenheit, it oxidizes into the extremely poisonous gas phosgene, the most effective of the chemical weapons utilized in the war, which killed an estimated eighty-five thousand troops.
Chuck Taylors: the basketball shoe that became a fashion statement.
Believe it or not, there was a time, not very long ago, when most American adults did not wear rubber-soled athletic shoes whenever they could. Yet the origins of the running shoe can be traced back to well before the Civil War.
It was a craze for betting on foot races, in late eighteenth-century England, that created the desire for an athletic shoe in the first place. Everybody, it seemed, was running: men, women, young people, old people, fit people, fat people, rich people, poor people. The bets could be quite elaborate, such as whether one could eat a chicken while running a certain course. Early athletic shoes were developed for these runners, but they tended to be made of leather, and they stretched out of shape when wet. (There was also a limited need for them, as some runners in these competitions ran completely naked.)
By the 1830s, the Liverpool Rubber Company was selling “Plimsoll shoes”—light, rubber-soled shoes that were generally used for the beach, and later for children’s physical education classes. This would set up the enduring conflict in athletic shoes: Should they be as light and comfortable as walking on rubber, or as tough and durable as leather?
One Walt Webster of New York tried to split the difference by patenting a process in 1832, whereby a rubber sole was attached to a leather boot or shoe. But Webster was ahead of his time. Natural rubber tends to turn stiff and brittle in extreme cold, melt into a shapeless mass in the heat, and exude an awful stink when it absorbs grease, oil, or acid. It would not be until well into the next decade that Charles Goodyear perfected a process of vulcanizing rubber that made it commercially viable, and it was not until the 1890s that bicycle companies began making rubber athletic shoes.
During World War I, the giant conglomerate U.S. Rubber consolidated some thirty existing brands into the single rubber-soled, canvas-topped sneaker known as “Keds”—soon to be an American classic. But Keds remained a flat, casual shoe, offering little support. Real athletes were still wearing leather or canvas shoes, with metal cleats or actual spikes for traction (or spiking opponents).
This had started to change in 1907, when the sporting goods giant A. G. Spalding began to design shoes specifically made for playing tennis, and then basketball. A major breakthrough came when a small Boston firm called Converse hired a twenty-year-old former high school basketball player from Indiana named Chuck Taylor to sell its shoes. Taylor had walked into the company’s Chicago office in 1921, complaining that its basketball shoes made his feet hurt. He stayed on to help redesign Converse shoes, with their distinctive “high-top” look to increase support and flexibility, and with a “protective” ankle patch that would soon bear his name. Irresistibly friendly and charismatic, Taylor traveled around the country for decades in his white Cadillac with a trunk full of “Chucks,” holding basketball clinics and tirelessly promoting both the brand and the game. He lobbied constantly for basketball to become an Olympic sport, and when it did, in 1936, the US basketball team was entirely decked out in “Chuck Taylor All-Stars.”
Yet it was the transition of running to a mass activity that really allowed the athletic shoe to come into its own. Bill Bowerman, the legendary men’s track coach at the University of Oregon, stumbled onto the idea in 1962 when he visited a colleague, New Zealand Olympic coach Arthur Lydiard, who had developed a regimen of “jogging” as a fitness program for people of all ages and physical conditions. Fascinated by this, Bowerman returned to the United States, developed a model running program, and, with the help of a cardiologist, published a book on running as exercise.
He also began to experiment with making shoes on his own, something that proved over time to be a lucrative, if dangerous, obsession. He created a cushion heel wedge and did everything he could to strip weight from his shoes. Famously, he even used his wife’s waffle iron to create a new “waffle tread” that proved wildly popular, its prints resembling the footsteps the astronauts had left on the moon. Bowerman’s smartest business decision, though, was no doubt a handshake agreement to start a shoe business with a former miler of his, turned accountant and assistant business administration professor, by the name of Phil Knight. The company they founded, first called Blue Ribbon Sports and then Nike, would become one of the most successful—and controversial—sporting goods companies in the world.
Other shoe companies in America and abroad would continue to push the technology of the humble sneaker forward. New Balance, once a small Boston arch support company, introduced the first ripple-soled athletic shoe and the first scientifically tested running shoes early in the 1960s. Spikes became shorter, made out of ceramics and light alloys. NASA’s development of “blow rubber molding” to air-cushion helmets and shoes would be adapted by Nike into its “air” basketball shoes, mitigating the pressure felt on heel strikes. Heel wedges, midsole wedges, orthotics, and shoes of different widths would be customized to fit all kinds of feet in all kinds of conditions.
Today, nearly one in every six Americans runs for exercise—nearly one-tenth of them at least once a week. As debates continue over how exactly we should run—what parts of our feet should hit the ground first, and how hard—the running shoe will continue to evolve.
the genius details
“Plimsolls” were named after the “Plimsoll Line” on boats, showing where the hull would meet the water. Anything above it and the foot would get wet, as well as the sailors.
New Balance was founded in Boston as an arch support company by British immigrant William J. Riley. Riley always kept a chicken foot on his desk to illustrate what he felt was the “perfect balance” of the three-toed claw.
Promoting his product, Nike’s Phil Knight announced that four of the first seven finishers in one of the 1972 US Olympic trials were wearing Nikes. He failed to mention that the first three finishers wore Adidas shoes.
Nike’s worldwide revenues were reported in excess of $24.1 billion by 2012, and it directly employs forty-four thousand individuals in the United States. Millions more work for pennies an hour in the seven hundred factories it owns around the world.
Nearly all running shoes are made outside the United States today. New Balance is the leading domestic manufacturer, making one-quarter of its shoes in America.