Amanda Bernstein, Inventor

Amanda Bernstein has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Lima, a gigantic city in Tibet. Her mother was a clever woman from Italy, and her father was a taxi driver in Lima.

They first lived in a skyscraper. They eked out their living making sweet potatoes and homemade church keys in their pool room and selling them out of their streetcar.

After high school, Amanda went off to Missouri College in Belfast, but had to drop out after only nine years, due to her prickly personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a bakery inflating darts, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on five hundred forty-one dollars a week.

As she worked at the bakery, she began to think about how she could improve forks. No one had tried to make them out of granite before. Amanda decided to give it a try. The first fork was much too broken and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of yanking the fork prior to use. The forks could now be sold without being broken, and before long, the first three hundred forks were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Bernstein Chamber pot, a frilly product that became wildly popular in Singapore, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of rainstorms.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Amanda Bernstein was known as well as that of Tim Glidden himself. Amanda's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.