Jacuzzi

How two-year-old Kenny's rheumatoid arthritis led to a special bubble bath

Candido Jacuzzi (Casarsa della Delizia, Friuli, February 24, 1903 – Arizona, October 7, 1986)

Father Giovanni Jacuzzi (1855-1929) came from the village of Casarsa della Delizia, Friuli, north of Venice. There was a great famine in that region towards the end of the nineteenth century.

From 1890, the population fled en masse to America, Canada, Australia or Argentina. 1913 was a record year: 600,000 Italians left their country to look for happiness elsewhere. Between 1907 and 1921, Giovanni's entire family of seven boys and six girls moved to California.

In Berkeley he and his sons set up a factory for the production of aircraft parts, especially propellers.

The quality was so good that in 1917, when the United States entered World War I, they were also able to supply the United States Air Force, the basis of their fortune. After that war, the Jacuzzis even tried to market their own aircraft.

An enclosed cockpit monoplane. When Giovanni junior and four passengers died in a test flight in 1921, they resolutely switched to the production of wine filters and pumping installations, including for the irrigation of fields.

A photo from 1938 shows the brothers Candido, Gelindo, Giuseppe, Franco and Valeriano standing proudly behind five of their special pumps.

1942 was an important year in Jacuzzi history. Kenneth ("Ken"), Candido's fifteen-month-old son, suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and had to go to the hospital daily for the healing, hydrotherapeutic effect of a course of swirling and bubbling water.

However, Candido discovered in the hospital that the special pool's pumps were very similar to the ones he sold in his store.

After some experiments, he succeeded in developing a private version at home, an elementary bubble bath with a kind of outboard motor, so that his son no longer had to go to the hospital.

He later made a portable version of this, which not only the sick but also sportsmen made grateful use of. A health craze that raged in Hollywood in the 1950s made the portable known to a select few.

Actress Jayne Mansfield testified that she loved the pump and that helped with sales. But the device remained a by-product of the more serious work.

The real breakthrough came in 1968 when Roy, a third generation Jacuzzi and 24 years old, came up with the idea of removing the 'outboard motor' and placing it against the wall outside. He forced water and air into the bath through four pipes.

The real Jacuzzijet was born. Roy's elderly uncles thought the idea was crazy and thought it wouldn't catch on. Roy himself would later admit that he never expected such a jacuzzi cult.

He presented the first version in 1968 at a trade fair in California's Orange County, not coincidentally the wealthiest district in the United States. The public turned out to be completely ready for what was then called a 'Roman bath'.

Price: $700.

In 1970 the Adonis type followed, for two people. When US President Gerald Ford installed a jacuzzi in the White House in 1974 – now there are four – the status-conscious eastern part of the United States also changed tack.
Jacuzzi Brothers built factories in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. After 1970, the conquest of Europe followed. The European exchange actually arrived in Valvasone, a village next to Casarsa, from where Giuseppe Jacuzzi had left 55 years earlier in pursuit of the American dream.

The government charged Candido, the inventor of the portable jacuzzi, with five counts of tax evasion in 1969, and he fled to Italy. At an advanced age he was allowed to return to the United States where he died in Arizona in 1986.

The British newspaper The Guardian then wrote that he had not only successfully grown wine in Italy, but also developed a newfangled monokini. Candido also experienced how a quarrel broke out in the large Jacuzzi family and Jacuzzi Brothers had to be sold in 1979.

Ken Candido, born in 1941, was confined to a wheelchair all his life due to rheumatoid arthritis. Nevertheless, he led a very active life as a businessman, as a painter and especially as an activist for numerous organizations of the disabled.

In 2005, he published a 500-page family chronicle and account of his own struggles titled A Father's Invention to Ease a Son's Pain.