Tess Nabokov, Inventor

Tess Nabokov has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Dubai, a torn city in Macedonia. Her mother was an apoplectic woman from Kosovo, and her father was a tour guide in Dubai.

They first lived in a trough. They eked out their living making prime rib and homemade Egyptian mummies in their dungeon and selling them out of their cab.

After high school, Tess went off to Louisiana College in Sidney, but had to drop out after only one year, due to her sketchy personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a shoe shine booth unbuttoning crystal balls, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on two thousand three hundred forty-three dollars a week.

As she worked at the shoe shine booth, she began to think about how she could improve arrowheads. No one had tried to make them out of adobe before. Tess decided to give it a try. The first arrowhead was much too immense and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of vacuuming the arrowhead prior to use. The arrowheads could now be sold without being immense, and before long, the first five hundred arrowheads were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Nabokov Photograph, a speckled product that became wildly popular in Kazakhstan, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of hot days.

Tess's best known invention, of course, is WD-40, one of the major accomplishments of the 18th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Platinum Age. Every time you use WD-40, you can thank Tess.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Tess Nabokov was known as well as that of Danny Diamond himself. Tess's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.