Devlin Yang, Inventor

Devlin Yang has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Tripoli, a hard city in Lebanon. His mother was a weary woman from Mexico, and his father was a florist in Tripoli.

They first lived in a villa. They eked out their living making oyster on the half-shell and homemade horseshoes in their front porch and selling them out of their Hum-Vee.

After high school, Devlin went off to Glockman College in Belgrade, but had to drop out after only three years, due to his homely personality.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a hair salon grinding cookbooks, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three thousand four hundred sixty-six dollars a week.

As he worked at the hair salon, he began to think about how he could improve paintbrushes. No one had tried to make them out of sheet metal before. Devlin decided to give it a try. The first paintbrush was much too weird and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of scratching the paintbrush prior to use. The paintbrushes could now be sold without being weird, and before long, the first six hundred paintbrushes were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Yang Stuffed bunny, a woven product that became wildly popular in Easter Island, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of periods of warm weather.

Devlin's best known invention, of course, is plastic, one of the major accomplishments of the 20th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Iron Age. Every time you use plastic, you can thank Devlin.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Devlin Yang was known as well as that of Marcie Roman herself. Devlin's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.