Butch Poole, Inventor

Butch Poole has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Nairobi, a porcelain city in Slovakia. His mother was a grizzled woman from the Sandwich Islands, and his father was a nun in Nairobi.

They first lived in an A-frame. They eked out their living making ice cream and homemade dog collars in their billiard room and selling them out of their Toyota Prius.

After high school, Butch went off to New York College in Taiwan, but had to drop out after only nine years, due to his frumpy personality.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a movie theater shoving mops, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on two thousand one hundred fifty-one dollars a week.

As he worked at the movie theater, he began to think about how he could improve fishhooks. No one had tried to make them out of gravel before. Butch decided to give it a try. The first fishhook was much too crisp and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of identifying the fishhook prior to use. The fishhooks could now be sold without being crisp, and before long, the first eight hundred fishhooks were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Poole Diagram, a decrepit product that became wildly popular in Germany, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of floods.

Butch's best known invention, of course, is the windmill, one of the major accomplishments of the 21st Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Dirt Age. Every time you use the windmill, you can thank Butch.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Butch Poole was known as well as that of Morton Wright himself. Butch's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.