Jacob Youphes
Ofri Levinson ’25
Jacob Youphes was a Jewish immigrant from Latvia who came to America to make a new life. In 1854 he changed his last name to Davis and moved around trying to make a living as a tailor. He settled his family in the bustling town of Reno, Nevada and made sturdy tents, horse blankets, and wagon covers. Reno was a scrappy outpost teeming with a mix of gold prospectors, loggers, and Chinese immigrant workers building the first railroad to the West.
One day, the wife of a woodcutter asked Jacob if he could make her husband a pair of more durable work pants out of his tent canvas. He was a large man who wore through his clothes faster than she could keep up with repairs. Jacob reinforced the seams that were the stress points with copper rivets, just like he did to attach leather straps to the horse blankets he made. The work pants were very popular and he sold two hundred pairs in the next eighteen months.
When Jacob was ordering a new supply of canvas from his wholesale supplier in San Francisco, the owner, a Jewish immigrant named Levi Strauss, suggested they go into business together. Changing the material to denim, a hefty twill weave with indigo dyed warp threads woven together with white weft threads (which is why the inside of jeans are white) meant dirt showed less than on the off-white plain canvas. They filed for a patent for the riveted "waist overalls" in 1873 and set up a factory in San Francisco, where the Levi Strauss company still operates today.
The company's profits allowed Levi to support his community. He contributed to the Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum and Home, the Eureka Benevolent Society, the Hebrew Board of Relief, Temple Emanu-El (the city's first synagogue) and provided funds for twenty-eight scholarships at the University of California, Berkeley. As of 2024, Levi Strauss & Company has a net worth of $1.86 billion and is one of the world's largest jeans manufacturers.
Sources
- https://www.levistrauss.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Jacob-Davis-His-Life-and-Contributions1.pdf
- https://www.ocregister.com/2023/05/19/150th-anniversary-how-levis-could-have-been-called-jacobs/
- https://www.history.com/news/transcontinental-railroad-chinese-immigrants
