The jacuzzi hot tub takes its name from an Italian family that emigrated to California in the early 20th century, and was credited with several inventions, including the bubbling spa. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Jacuzzi Word Origin”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. In the early 20th century, seven brothers emigrated over time from Italy to California. They started in Southern California picking oranges and then later they moved north.
And in 1915, they opened a machine shop in Berkeley, California. And they manufactured a
Lot of different kinds of things like propellers. And they also designed water irrigation pumps.
And produce them. One of the brothers was named Candido, and he got married and had four children.
And the youngest of them, Kenny, was almost two years old when he contracted strep throat.
And unfortunately that led to rheumatic fever, and that led to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.
This was a very painful condition. It limited the boy’s mobility, and he was treated a couple of.
Times a week at physical therapy in these big stainless steel hydrotherapy tanks. But his mom didn’t like them because he had to share them with other people. And so she spoke to her husband and asked if he could come up with something that they could put in their own bathtub at home, some kind of little water pump to recreate that kind of motion.
And so his dad ended up making a pump for their home bathtub. And it worked so well that their company began selling them. And then the next generation included a family member named Roy, who realized that you could put those kinds of pumps in a freestanding bathtub and market them to the public.
And so you can probably guess the name of this Italian family. It must have been Jacuzzi. It was the Jacuzzis.
Yeah. But I thought that that was so cool that the thing that you’re going out, you know, the hot.
Tub that you’re going out to with your plastic cup and a drink.
It was for therapy.
It was for therapy.
It was a father’s effort to ease his son’s pain.
I can’t imagine being that young with those kinds of conditions.
Yeah.
You know, Kenny ended up living to a ripe old age.
He only died a couple of years ago.
And he worked in Italy for the Jacuzzi Company.
And then later, he was the director of the Office of the Americans with Disabilities in the state of Arizona.
How about that?
That’s perfect.
What a great story.
So Jacuzzi has a family name, family history.
Yeah, another eponym.
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