Word: booth
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...London on Christmas morning, 1865, tall, hirsute William Booth came down to breakfast with a straw-lined basket in his hands. "Here," he said to his sons & daughters, "is God's Christmas gift...
...Inventor. PhotoMetric is the product of more than two years (and $500,000 worth) of research by Henry Booth, boss of Manhattan's Amalgamated Textiles Ltd., one of the biggest U.S. jobbers of fine woolens, and its subsidiary, Bennett, Inc. (eleven U.S. stores). Booth, a grandson of England's famed Salvation Army Founder William Booth, came to the U.S. at 16, worked up in the textile jobbing field. In the depression '30s he merged five jobbers to form Amalgamated, which later became U.S. distributor for Forstmann Woolen Co. and more than 20 top British mills...
...idea for PhotoMetric came to Booth while he was plowing his Pomfret (Conn.) farm. "I suddenly realized," said he, "that the clothing industry was plodding along with the same horse-&-buggy techniques of 50 years ago." The tradition of the industry forced retailers of ready-made suits to keep big inventories to supply only a small range of materials and sizes. In addition, alterations for the hard-to-fit customer cost retailers 6% of their gross. Why not work out a method to eliminate alterations? To Booth the answer was photography-in effect, an application of the Bertillon system...
...Invention. For fast measurement, Booth worked out a system of eight mirrors to reflect all sides of the customer. By focusing the camera on a panel of four mirrors, he was able to get four reflected views on one film: front, rear, side and one from directly overhead. The film is projected on a screen, half lifesize. Tailors read the measurements from the calibrated screen. The measurements are then fed into another Booth invention: the Photo-Metric calculator...
Money Saver. After Booth has installed PhotoMetric at all his Bennett stores, he will lease the equipment to other retailers (at $75 to $100 a month, plus royalties) and to manufacturers at cost. The retailer will merely have to take the picture and send it to the manufacturer to make the suit. Booth estimates that any retailer with a gross of $50,000 a year can profitably adopt PhotoMetric. The greatest savings will be in alteration costs, inventory, space, insurance, etc. In fact, Booth thinks that anyone can set up in business with a swatch of cloth and a camera...