Morris Michtom


Morris Michtom was a Russian-born businessman and inventor who, with his wife Rose, invented the teddy bear in 1902. They founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company which, after Michtom's death, became the largest doll-making company in the United States.

Biography

Michtom was born to a Jewish family and immigrated to New York in 1887. He sold candy in his shop at 404 Tompkins Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn by day and made stuffed animals with his wife Rose at night.
The teddy bear was inspired by a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman depicting American president Theodore Roosevelt—commonly called "Teddy"—having compassion for a bear at the end of an unsuccessful hunting trip in Mississippi in 1902. Michtom saw the drawing and created a tiny plush bear cub which he sent to Roosevelt. After receiving permission to use Roosevelt's name, Michtom put a plush bear in the shop window with a sign "Teddy's bear." After the creation of the bear in 1902, the sale of the bears was so brisk that in 1907 Michtom created the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company.
Michtom died on the 21st of July 1938 at the age of sixty-eight. He was predeceased by his beloved wife Rose and two children, and survived by two sons and a daughter.