The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I was work clothing for miners, and nobody wanted to be seen in me.
My real invention was not the cloth. It was the metal rivets at the corners of the pockets.
One of my names comes from Genoa and the other from Nîmes.
That tiny fifth pocket was built to hold a pocket watch.
Blue trousers. Almost everyone owns a pair.
Jeans
Jacob Davis had the rivet idea and no money to file for it; Levi Strauss had the money. They patented it together in 1873, and it is the patent, not the fabric, that built the company.
Denim existed long before the trousers. What Jacob Davis, a Latvian-born tailor in Nevada, worked out in 1871 was that pockets tore at the corners and a copper rivet fixed it. He could not afford the patent, so he wrote to his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss, and they filed together in 1873. For eighty years the result was strictly workwear. The shift to fashion came through fifties cinema and rebellion, and by then the small fifth pocket, originally for a pocket watch, had lost its purpose without ever losing its place.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #41 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #40. Next: mystery #42. Or try #18, #19, #20, #21, #22, #23.