Levi Strauss
Mr. Strauss was a forty-niner seeking his fortune in the California gold rush. Like most, he was starving, so he asked relatives back in Europe to send him denim cloth that he thought would make great tents for his fellow panners.
He visited a few of his buyers, but instead of seeing tents, he found out that they were using the very strong denim as aprons. He decided to make blue jeans instead of tents and founded one of the largest clothing manufacturers in the world—rivets and all. I always wondered: why the rivets?
Corvette
To prevent teenage highway fatalities from burying the needle of their parents' cars, the federal government enacted a rule forcing automobile manufacturers to build cars with speedometers displaying only up to 85 mph around 1980. The rule lost its speed when Corvette started making cars with two speed readouts—one that complied with the federal mandate, the other indicating the real speed.