Word: danish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Spindly and bespectacled, Kroyer's own background smacks more of a dropout than a Danish Da Vinci. A haberdasher's son who never went be yond grammar school, Kroyer even now winces at technical journals on the ground that "you risk reading yourself stupid." He explains his self-schooled skills by saying that "the recognition of a demand works on me like a magnet. I then set out to define the problems and correct them...
...idling along in a dull job as a salesman for the family firm. Struck with an idea, he designed a pair of triangles to be sewn into the droopy women's knitwear bathing suits of the day. The new wrinkle-first built-in bras ever to grace Danish suits-proved to be a standout at the beaches and a smash at the cash register...
Sugar & Stone. Before long, Kroyer was off on his own. Noting the wartime shortage of elastic, he invented an ingenious substitute of wire and thread, sold it to Danish textilemakers for $15,000. A flood of gizmos followed-bicycle rim linings made of woven paper, which bike-happy Danes found would save wear on tires, paper hammocks, one of the first pressure cookers to appear in Europe, even a skillet with special grease-catching depressions to improve frying of steaks. That lowly item has been cooking up brisk sales in Denmark and seven other countries for more than 15 years...
...surprisingly, Kroyer's creations have since run a mad scientist's gamut. Synopal originally sprang from a Danish asphaltmaker's plea for something to give blacktop paving the high night visibility and skid-resistance of rival concrete. Kroyer promptly invented a white, synthetic, quartz-like crushed "stone"-actually a form of crystallized glass-to do the job. Seeing other possibilities, he has sold the stone as brewery and municipal water filters, made it into bricks to build 50 gleaming white villas around Denmark, in hopes of promoting them as a status symbol...
Dropping the Ampersand. International Telephone & Telegraph came into being in 1920 when Sosthenes Behn, a young entrepreneur born in the Virgin Islands of Danish-French ancestry (though "Sosthenes" is Greek for "of sound strength"), founded it as a New York-based holding company for several Caribbean telephone companies he had recently acquired. Behn's choice of a corporate name was an unabashed effort to trade on the reputation of the giant American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Behn was successful in creating this confusion; even today, many people think of ITT as the international division of A.T. & T. Behn received...