NOTEWORTHY INVENTORS:
NOTEWORTHY INVENTORS:
ADOLPH DASSLER
WILLIAM SCHOLL
• William Scholl was born in LaPorte, Indiana in 1882 as one of 13 children. Even as a boy on a mid-western farm, William was interested in feet and shoes. As a teen he learned to make shoes, and then was apprenticed to a cobbler. • When he moved to Chicago to set up his own shop, he noticed how many people had trouble with corns, bunions, and fallen arches, and he was appalled. So he worked as a shoe salesman by day and put himself through medical school by night, becoming a podiatrist in 1904 at the age of 22. • That same year he patented an arch support which he peddled to other shoe salesmen, and its popularity gave him the capital he needed to invent more products for the feet, including remedies for corns, bunions, warts, calluses, foot odor, ingrown toenails, athlete’s foot, and many other foot-related ailments. • He established a correspondence course to teach basic podiatry to shoe store clerks and sent a team of trained sales representatives around the country to deliver public lectures on proper foot care. • In 1916 William Scholl sponsored the national Cinderella Foot Contest to find the most beautiful feet in the U.S. Ladies flocked to shoe stores by the thousands to have their feet measured and scrutinized, and pictures of the prize-winning feet were published in magazines and newspapers nationwide. Then the ladies flocked to drugstores by the thousands to buy Scholl's products in order to make their feet look more beautiful. • By the time he died in Chicago in 1968, William Scholl's line of foot care products eventually expanded to include over a thousand different items. He left the company to his nephews, and it still flourishes today.
• Born in Germany in 1900, Adolf Dassler, who went by the nickname of Adi, loved tap dancing. He began creating his own tap shoes and got a lot of advice from his father, who worked in a shoe factory, manufacturing cleats for athletes. After he returned from service during World War I, he set up a cobbler's shop in his mother's laundry. Adi decided to go into the dance shoe business, and his brother joined him in the venture, which they called the Dassler Brothers Shoe Company. • At the World Tap Dancing Competition in 1928, Adi outfitted a number of the top competitors, and sales of his shoes climbed. During World War II, Adi was drafted into producing boots for soldiers. • After the war, Adi and his brother split up and his brother started a sports shoe company called Puma. Adi renamed his own company, combining several letters from both his first and last names. He designed his company’s three-striped logo. He branched out and soon was making 30 different types of shoes for 11 different sports. • Much of his success was due to his close contact with the athletes who wore his shoes, and his persistent presence at sporting events. Sales skyrocketed after Germany won the World Soccer Cup in 1954 with every member of the team wearing his shoes. He got many famous athletes to use his footwear including Jesse Owens and Muhammad Ali. • Aggressive marketing was a cornerstone of his business, and he expanded into many different sporting goods. When Adi died in 1978, his son took over the business. Today the shoe company Adi founded is the second largest sportswear manufacturer in the world. Can you name it?
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Answer: Adidas
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