Tailor Jacob Davis, working in Reno, Nevada, had been reinforcing the pocket corners of workers' trousers with copper rivets to stop them from tearing under strain. Lacking money to patent the idea himself, he partnered with San Francisco dry goods merchant Levi Strauss, who supplied the denim fabric. Their joint patent, granted this day, launched what became one of the most recognizable garments in world history, the modern blue jean.
Jacob Davis was a Latvian Jewish immigrant working as a tailor in Reno when a customer, a woodcutter's wife, asked him to make trousers sturdy enough to survive her husband's heavy labor without ripping at the pocket seams. Davis had the idea of hammering metal rivets into the stress points, borrowing a technique he already used for horse blankets and tents, and the reinforced trousers proved wildly popular with miners and laborers around Nevada.
Recognizing he had something valuable but unable to afford the $68 patent filing fee himself, Davis wrote to Levi Strauss, the San Francisco merchant who supplied him with denim cloth, and proposed they patent the design together and split ownership. Strauss agreed immediately, seeing the commercial potential.
The patent, granted May 20, 1873 by the U.S. Patent Office but often celebrated around this date in company lore, transformed Strauss's dry goods business into a manufacturing empire. The riveted trousers, originally intended purely for miners, ranchers, and railroad workers, eventually crossed over into mainstream fashion in the twentieth century, becoming a global symbol of American youth culture, rebellion, and casual style worn on every continent.