One of the reasons for Tomáš Baťa's success was his vision to introduce new technologies to his company, taking production to massive levels worldwide.

So between the 1920s and 1940s, Bata built factories in Asia, South America and Africa (which he foresaw as a virgin market), thus becoming the largest shoemaker in the world.

In the mid-1930s, in the throes of the Great Depression, the Bata shoe company was faced with a serious dilemma: Mussolini needed boots for his army.

In the company headquarters in Zlín, the central shaft of the building was an elevator with a personal office that could move from one floor to another.

Another legacy is Batanagar in Kolkata, India, which originally housed the shoe factory and the clerical employees, and today is a booming condominium development maintaining the name.

During this period, the Canadian engineering plant manufactured strategic components for the Allies, and Baťa worked together with the government in exile of President Beneš and other democratic powers.

With the end of the war, the Bata company in Czechoslovak territory was nationalized and the communists began to take control and to eliminate anything even remotely reminding people of Baťa's system.

In 1946, Bata operated 38 factories and 2,168 company shops; they produced 34 million pairs of shoes and employed 34,000 people.

In 1948, however, Czechoslovakia was fully seized by the communist powers, and Bata enterprises in Poland, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were lost.

Václav Havel, the Czech dissident leader and playwright turned president, asked Baťa to return.

Baťa and his wife Sonja were greeted warmly in the main square in Zlín by thousands of cheering people.

Baťa died on September 1, 2008, at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, and was buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

He joined the regiment during the Second World War, and he served as a captain in the Canadian Reserve Army and as honorary colonel from 1999 to 2007.