The bear was invented twice

This is a real sample of the letters I write to order. The person this one was written for loves teddy bears. Yours would be about your person's thing. Sources at the end.

Dear friend,

You love teddy bears. So here is the true story of the one in your hands, and it begins with two people on two continents in the same year who had never heard of each other.

In Giengen, a small town in Swabia, there lived a woman named Margarete Steiff. She was eighteen months old when a fever took the use of her legs and left her right arm too weak to lift. It was polio, though it took the doctors three years to say so. In the middle of the nineteenth century, that was supposed to be the end of a life. She taught zither to children until she had saved enough for a sewing machine, and by 1877 she had her own felt shop. In 1879 she found a magazine pattern for a toy elephant and sewed it in felt, stuffed with lambswool. The story goes that it was meant to be a pincushion. Children took it and made it a toy instead. That elephant is the reason this letter exists.

In 1902 her nephew Richard designed a plush bear, fifty-five centimetres tall, with arms and legs that moved. Model 55 PB: 55 for the height, P for Plüsch, B for beweglich, movable. In March 1903 he took the bears to the Leipzig toy fair and an American buyer ordered three thousand of them on the spot. An earlier shipment sent to a New York showroom had drawn almost no interest at all.

In the same year, an ocean away, Theodore Roosevelt went hunting near Onward, Mississippi. On 14 November 1902 his hosts cornered a black bear, tied it to a willow tree, and invited the president to shoot it. Roosevelt refused, on the grounds that it was unsporting. Two days later the Washington Post printed Clifford Berryman's cartoon of the refusal. A Brooklyn candy-shop owner named Morris Michtom saw it and, with his wife Rose, made a stuffed bear and called it Teddy's Bear. He wrote to the president asking permission to use his name. Roosevelt said yes. After that, Michtom could not make them fast enough.

So the bear was invented twice, in a single year, by two people who had each been told no: a woman in a wheelchair whose future had been written off, and a shopkeeper copying a newspaper cartoon. Neither version is the real one. Both are.

And here is the detail I cannot get over. In 1904 Margarete's nephew Franz needed a way to stop imitators, so he put a small metal button in the left ear of every Steiff animal. It has been there ever since. Look at what he had embossed on it: an elephant, with an S-shaped trunk. The mark of one of the most famous toy companies on earth is the pincushion his aunt made, that children stole, that began everything.

By 1907 the company had four hundred employees and eighteen hundred people sewing at home, and made 973,999 teddy bears in a single year.

That is what the bear you love actually is. Not one object. A refusal, a pattern in a magazine, a woman who taught zither to buy a machine, and an elephant on a button. Hold it a little differently now.

Sources

I write these to order. One letter about the thing a person you love lights up about: their obsession, their trade, a diagnosis, their hometown, a person they lost. 400-600 words, researched from real sources, every claim traceable, written to them and not about them. 48 hours, one revision. If I cannot find anything true to say, you pay nothing. The first one is free; after that, $25 by card.

Write to me: [email protected]. Tell me who it is for and what they love. That is the whole form.