Elizabeth Locke, Inventor

Elizabeth Locke has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Ontario, a spongy city in Egypt. Her mother was a tense woman from Azerbaijan, and her father was a harpist in Ontario.

They first lived in a subway tunnel. They eked out their living making blueberry pie and homemade paperweights in their atrium and selling them out of their Lincoln Town Car.

After high school, Elizabeth went off to New Hampshire College in Monterrey, but had to drop out after only nine years, due to her lanky professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a Starbucks refurbishing sticks of gum, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four thousand eight hundred two dollars a week.

As she worked at the Starbucks, she began to think about how she could improve bird feeders. No one had tried to make them out of grass before. Elizabeth decided to give it a try. The first bird feeder was much too ornate and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of greasing the bird feeder prior to use. The bird feeders could now be sold without being ornate, and before long, the first eight thousand bird feeders were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Locke Billiard ball, a primitive product that became wildly popular in Australia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of humid days.

Elizabeth's best known invention, of course, is wallpaper, one of the major accomplishments of the 18th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Uranium Age. Every time you use wallpaper, you can thank Elizabeth.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Elizabeth Locke was known as well as that of Dan Bartholomew himself. Elizabeth's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.