While working on pneumatic streetcars at Earle Manufacturing Co., the mechanical engineer also found it tedious to fasten the high-button boots in vogue at the time. You’re probably wearing its intellectual-property progeny even now: Judson had created the proto-zipper.īy then, Judson held 14 patents, all for items in pneumatic streetcars, and none of them successful, before he finally pulled it together with his clasp locker.įashion always had a hand on the zipper. Judson, the onetime peripatetic purveyor of band cutters and grain scales, revealed his patented “clasp locker” to the public at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. By other accounts, they quit.Ī Swedish immigrant who picked up the idea in Pennsylvania may have made it better, but Chicago never was shy about exhibitions, or taking credit.īehold: It was here, in 1893, that inventor Whitcomb L. But together they rented a shipping room on North Clark Street and set out to describe a comprehensive offering of 163 products in their first mail-order catalog. It was a preposterously disruptive idea, the of its day.Įarly investors balked, and it’s hard to imagine how Ward and two fellow employees scrounged the $1,600 in capital it took to amass startup inventory - or why they tried again after their first lot incinerated in the Great Chicago Fire. Ward’s plan was to buy up big-city inventory with cash, cut selling costs by eliminating retail overhead - and deliver dry goods to townsfolk at the nearest railroad station. Store owners held local monopolies, and middlemen who hauled manufactured products to the countryside ran up prices. ![]() His name was Aaron Montgomery Ward, and his idea was mail-order retail. ![]() But his abiding sense that farmers were being cheated by backcountry merchants sparked the idea for which Chicago remembers his name. He’d manned a barrel-factory cutting machine, stacked bricks in kilns, fitted shoes, managed a pair of country stores, then hustled lamps and dry goods as a traveling salesman. Ward was the founder of Montgomery Ward and Company and originator of mail order selling. ![]() Aaron Montgomery Ward is shown in an undated handout photo.
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