Did you know that there are numerous people whose achievements are famous, but their names are generally not known? Here is a sampling of some Jewish achievers.
Jacob Youphes was a tailor from Riga, Russia, who changed his name to Davis after arriving in the United States.
His customers wanted tougher work clothes, so he invented a reinforcement process using copper rivets and reinforced stitching in cotton denim that he purchased from Levi Strauss.
Needing financial assistance for a patent and additional material as orders piled up, Davis turned to Strauss, and a lifelong partnership was begun.
People began calling the durable pants “Levi’s,” but it was Jacob Davis who made the jeans tough.
Julius Rosenwald was a poor peddler’s son who was also a tailor, eventually growing his business of producing a clothing line for the expanding Sears, Roebuck (mail-order catalog) and Company.
Rosenwald’s investment in Sears expanded as the company grew, and he eventually became president of the Sears Corporation.
After accumulating financial power, Rosenwald sought to put his fortune to worthwhile causes.
He partnered with the African-American community to improve African-American education, amounting to an investment of $70 million. Those funds resulted in the establishment of more than 5,000 schools for African-Americans, These were informally known as “Rosenwald Schools.”
Morris and Rose Michtom were a Brooklyn couple who owned a candy store. At night, they would make stuffed animals, which they displayed and sold in their store.
They saw a newspaper cartoon poking fun at a recent situation when President Theodore Roosevelt was on a bear hunting trip in Mississippi. A bear could not be found, except for a small cub that was tied to a tree.
The president refused to shoot the bear, and the newspaper cartoonist had his subject.
Rose saw the cartoon, built the teddy bear and, after writing the president, the Michtoms received permission to refer to the doll as the Teddy Bear. It was such a hit that their venture became the Ideal Toy Company. I don’t know about you, but I remember having a teddy bear when I was a little kid.
Isidor Rabi was a Polish-born American physicist and Nobel Prize winner in 1944, for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which led to microwave radar and microwave ovens.
Laszlo Biro, a Hungarian journalist originally from Argentina, worked with his chemist brother to develop the first working ballpoint pen in 1931.
Does the name Allie Wrubel ring a bell? Probably not. He was a musician who eventually moved to Hollywood, writing music for Disney.
What you will probably remember are some of his prize-winning songs of the 1940s, such as Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, The Lady From 29 Palms, Music Maestro Please, The Lady in Red, Gone With The Wind and Mine Alone.
Robert Adler, working for Zenith Television in the 1950s, took up his boss’s challenge to invent a device that can be used to tune out commercials, resulting in the first TV remote control. Of course, we still have the commercials.
The famous Barbie doll was the brainchild of American businesswoman Ruth Handler in 1959.
Samuel Ruben, scientist, accumulated more than 300 patents, including Duracell batteries. At the request of the Army Signal Corps, in 1942 he developed the mercury button cell to replace zinc carbon batteries.
Amazingly, the list of inventive Jews is never-ending.