Charlie Adams, Inventor

Charlie Adams has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Kabul, a small city in Pakistan. His mother was a happy woman from Kuwait, and his father was a biologist in Kabul.

They first lived in a cave. They eked out their living making lamb curry and homemade protest signs in their dining room and selling them out of their Abrams M1 tank.

After high school, Charlie went off to Hill College in Kabul, but had to drop out after only one year, due to his artistic professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at an ad agency softening bottles, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on eight hundred nine dollars a week.

As he worked at the ad agency, he began to think about how he could improve mops. No one had tried to make them out of balsa before. Charlie decided to give it a try. The first mop was much too fancy and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of copying the mop prior to use. The mops could now be sold without being fancy, and before long, the first four thousand mops were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Adams Baby doll, a nice product that became wildly popular in Saudi Arabia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of dense fogs.

Charlie's best known invention, of course, is barbed wire, one of the major accomplishments of the 17th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Cast iron Age. Every time you use barbed wire, you can thank Charlie.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Charlie Adams was known as well as that of Leah Pimsleur herself. Charlie's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.