Jacob Youphes was born to a Jewish family in Riga, Latvia, in 1831. He trained and worked as a tailor.
In 1854, Youphes emigrated to the United States, arriving by way of New York. There he changed his name to Jacob Davis, and ran a tailor’s shop. Davis moved to Maine and then California, in 1856, working as a journeyman tailor. He then moved to Western Canada in 1858 to find more profitable work, married a German immigrant, and had six children. In Canada, Davis worked at the Fraser River, panning for gold.
A decade later, Davis and his family moved to Reno, Nevada, where he opened a tailor shop on the main street in town. Reno was a tiny railroad town at the time, and Davis’ tailor shop made functional items such as tents, horse blankets, and wagon covers for the railway workers on the Central Pacific Railroad. Davis worked with heavy-duty cotton duck cloth and cotton denim purchased from Levi Strauss & Co., which, at the time, was a dry goods company in San Francisco.
To strengthen the stress points of the sewn items Davis made, he used copper rivets to reinforce the stitching. In December 1870, Davis was asked by a customer to make a pair of strong working pants for her husband, who was a woodcutter. To make robust pants, Davis used duck cloth and reinforced the weak points in the seams and pockets with copper rivets.
Word spread throughout the laborers along the railroad of the reinforced work pants. Davis began making the work pants out of duck cotton, and, by early 1871, out of denim cotton. Soon he could not keep up with demand.
Realizing the potential value in his reinforced pants concept, in 1872, Davis approached Levi Strauss and asked for his financial backing in the filing of a patent application. Strauss agreed, and on May 20, 1873, U.S. Patent No. 139,121 for “Improvements in fastening pocket openings” was issued to Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss and Company.
In 1873, Davis started sewing a double, orange-threaded stitched design into the back pocket of the jeans to distinguish the jeans from competitors’, and the feature became Registered U.S. Trade Mark No. 1,139,254. Strauss had set up a sizeable tailor shop in San Francisco for the production of Davis’ working pants, and Davis and his family had moved back to San Francisco so Davis could run the shop. Soon demand grew such that the shop was replaced by a manufacturing plant that Davis managed for Strauss. Davis worked at the plant for the remainder of his life. Work shirts and overalls were soon also produced at the plant.
Davis died in San Francisco in 1908, and he is buried at Hills of Eternity Memorial Park in Colma, California. In 2006, a plaque was erected in Reno at the location of Davis’ tailor shop to commemorate the invention of jeans there.
The pants did not get the moniker “jeans” until Boomers began using the name in the 1960s, according to the Levi Strauss & Co. website’s History of Jeans. Previously, the pants were called “dungarees” or “waist overalls.”
No matter what they are called, for those of us who prefer to be “Forever in Blue Jeans,” as Neil Diamond put it, have Jacob Davis to thank.