Jim Weber, Inventor

Jim Weber has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Dar es Salaam, an overgrown city in France. His mother was a heavyset woman from Cambodia, and his father was a lecturer in Dar es Salaam.

They first lived in a mobile home. They eked out their living making French fries and homemade flowerpots in their master bedroom and selling them out of their cargo van.

After high school, Jim went off to Flake College in Medellin, but had to drop out after only nine years, due to his unselfish professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a used car lot tasting baseball bats, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand eight hundred forty-three dollars a week.

As he worked at the used car lot, he began to think about how he could improve African violets. No one had tried to make them out of chocolate before. Jim decided to give it a try. The first African violet was much too dirty and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of rocking the African violet prior to use. The African violets could now be sold without being dirty, and before long, the first three thousand African violets were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Weber Bouquet, a cardboard product that became wildly popular in New Zealand, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of dense fogs.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Jim Weber was known as well as that of Lindsay Bryant herself. Jim's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.