Patent Analysis: J.W. Davis and Levi Strauss’s Fastening Pocket Openings

This activity can be used during a unit on Westward Expansion, inventions and innovations, and/or to build document analysis skills in younger students. For grades grades 3-6. Approximate time needed is 15-20 minutes.

Ask students to look at the partially obscured patent drawing. Without providing any context, model document analysis:

• Quickly scan this document. What do you notice first?
• Describe the document and the invention it depicts as if you were explaining it to someone who can’t see it.
• Based on what you can see, what do you think is the purpose of this invention? List evidence from the document to explain your opinion.

After some discussion, reveal that this is a patent drawing for an important invention. If students are unaware of the definition of a patent, provide a brief definition that a patent gives an inventor a temporary monopoly on his or her invention. Explain how in the United States, the Constitution gave Congress the power to “To promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” in Article I, Section 8.

Ask students to offer educated guesses as to the specific invention. If no one guesses jeans or Levi’s®, provide the following clues from their description of the invention:

• “My invention relates to a fastening for pocket-openings, whereby the sewed seams are prevented from ripping or starting from frequent pressure or strain thereon”
• “The rivet…is so fastened in the seam as to bind the two parts of cloth which the seam unites together.”
• “As a new article of manufacture, a pair of pantaloons having the pocket-openings secured at each edge by means of rivets, substantially in the manner described…”

Following a brief discussion and potential guesses, provide the following context for the invention. As you provide this information, see if students can guess the invention.

This invention has its roots in the frontier of the American West in January 1871. In Reno, Nevada, a tailor was asked by the wife of a laborer to create a pair of cheap durable pants for her ill husband. Her husband was a large man sick with dropsy and could not get a pair of pants to fit him.

 

She paid him three dollars and asked for strong pants as he generally tore his clothes while laboring. This made the inventor think of a new technique based on the work he had previously used for horse blankets and covers–the rivet. Instead of sewing at the pant’s weak points, instead he placed copper rivets to fasten them together.

 

After making a handful here and there, larger orders began to come in as other laborers noticed the quality of the pants. The cloth for the pants came from a supply store in San Francisco and its owner was the first person he told about his new invention. He decided to partner with his supplier and patented the invention under both of their names.

After sharing the historical context, discuss with students how the use of jeans has changed over time.