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Home | Great Inventions Levi Jeans
The Gold Rush of 1848 attracted many adventurers to California. One of them was a twenty-year-old named Levi Strauss. Strauss had been a draper, or cloth seller, in New York, and he took a few bolts of cloth to sell on the journey west. In this manner he earned his way, and by the time he reached California, Levi Strauss had sold everything except a roll of canvas. No one wanted clothes made of canvas!
Or did they? It turned out that "up in the diggings," where the miners worked, pants wore out very quickly. So Strauss made some pairs of canvas trousers to sell to miners. More and more miners were coming to Strauss and asking him for a pair of those canvas trousers. Not entirely happy with canvas, Levi started using a new fabric from Genoa, Italy The weavers there called the fabric "genes". Strauss changed the name to "jeans" and later he called his pants "Levi s". They were popular with cowboys as well as miners.
