Raymond Champion, Inventor

Raymond Champion has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Richmond, an important city in Belgium. His mother was a sleepy woman from Netherlands, and his father was a nurse in Richmond.

They first lived in an apartment. They eked out their living making moo goo gai pan and homemade mushrooms in their bedroom and selling them out of their UPS truck.

After high school, Raymond went off to Vermont College in Tucson, but had to drop out after only ten years, due to his shifty professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a police station stitching snails, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand two hundred twenty-two dollars a week.

As he worked at the police station, he began to think about how he could improve cameras. No one had tried to make them out of aluminum foil before. Raymond decided to give it a try. The first camera was much too ruined and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of loosening the camera prior to use. The cameras could now be sold without being ruined, and before long, the first five thousand cameras were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Champion Fork, a dusty product that became wildly popular in Somalia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of periods of warm weather.

Raymond's best known invention, of course, is the microwave oven, one of the major accomplishments of the 17th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Old newspaper Age. Every time you use the microwave oven, you can thank Raymond.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Raymond Champion was known as well as that of Josh Zwiebel himself. Raymond's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.