Another ‘jewish invention’ myth that I have seen claimed in recent months is the idea that jews invented the collar stay. (1)
Collar stays to those who don’t know are the hard/stiff elongated bits in modern shirt collars to ensure that collars remain stiff, smart and presentable rather than flimsy, scruffy and far less presentable.
For the record they look like this:
The claim is that the collar stay was invented in 1935 by a jews from Austria named Artur Wolf (he appears to have called himself Arthur Wolf later in life) which was successfully patented in 1936 as Austrian patent AT144978B titled ‘Stiffening insert for shirt collar’. (2)
Artur was indeed jewish and owned a textile manufacturing business in the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia and now the Czech Republic, who subsequently fled with his family to Great Britain in 1938 after the Anschluss with Austria and then onward to the United States in 1940. (3)
The problem is that the collar stay had already been invented some twenty-seven years earlier in 1908 by a Scandinavian immigrant to the United States named Herman Gustafson as US patent US1908420234A (4) to replace the detachable collar that dated from the eighteenth century (5) and even then ‘collar sticks’ had already been used for years if not decades which is merely an early collar stay. (6)
So no jews did not invent collar stays!
References
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/comments/18q24ls/what_are_some_things_that_were_invented_by_jews/
(2) https://patents.google.com/patent/AT144978B/en
(3) https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/5/resources/7871
(4) https://www.freepatentsonline.com/0902576.html
(5) https://www.otaa.com/blogs/gentlemans-guide/what-are-collar-stays
(6) https://www.hersey.co.uk/blogs/hersey-son-silversmiths-blog/history-of-the-collar-stiffener?srsltid=AfmBOoqxHVZHklmhQOadT2Y0fFHzuZrIpniCxR_MkUMuHnteHQM31OCd