Lois Keene, Inventor

Lois Keene has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Sunnyvale, an ancient city in Sweden. Her mother was a proud woman from Laos, and her father was a monk in Sunnyvale.

They first lived in a trough. They eked out their living making pizza and homemade houseplants in their bedroom and selling them out of their Volkswagen Passat.

After high school, Lois went off to Delaware College in Frankfurt, but had to drop out after only four years, due to her colorless personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a dry cleaner shaking cactus plants, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three thousand seventy-three dollars a week.

As she worked at the dry cleaner, she began to think about how she could improve cotton balls. No one had tried to make them out of platinum before. Lois decided to give it a try. The first cotton ball was much too polished and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of pushing the cotton ball prior to use. The cotton balls could now be sold without being polished, and before long, the first four hundred cotton balls were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Keene Nail, a greasy product that became wildly popular in France, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of driving rainstorms.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Lois Keene was known as well as that of Ole Cochran himself. Lois's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.