biography
| name: |
Roebuck, Alvah C(urtis)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1864–1948)
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| biography:
| Watch repairman and businessman, born near Lafayette, Indiana, USA. He began repairing watches as a child, and helped support his family at age 12 after his father died. He repaired watches for Richard Sears in Chicago until Sears sold the R W Sears Watch Co and moved to Iowa. Under the agreement, Sears was to refrain from selling watches in the Chicago area for a specific number of years, so he enticed Roebuck to form A C Roebuck & Co, a mail-order watch business based in Minneapolis (1891), which Sears then bought back and moved to Chicago as the Sears & Roebuck Co (1893). Roebuck reunited with Sears (1909) when Sears asked him to modernize the Emerson typewriter, and after Roebuck did so, it was renamed the Woodstock, and became very profitable for the Sears & Roebuck Co. Roebuck continued to work on entertainment devices, including a magic lantern, and also developed a motion picture company that he sold in 1924. He moved to Florida, lost all his money in real-estate speculation, and in 1930 returned to Sears & Roebuck Co as a correspondent and promoter. He retired to California in 1940. |
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