Jesse Hall, Inventor

Jesse Hall has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in New York, a decrepit city in Poland. His mother was an enraged woman from Israel, and his father was a ship's officer in New York.

They first lived in a convent. They eked out their living making oatmeal and homemade cigarette lighters in their patio and selling them out of their Gremlin.

After high school, Jesse went off to Utah College in Stockholm, but had to drop out after only six years, due to his stubby personality.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a shoe shine booth remembering statues, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand eight hundred ninety-eight dollars a week.

As he worked at the shoe shine booth, he began to think about how he could improve whistles. No one had tried to make them out of old newspaper before. Jesse decided to give it a try. The first whistle was much too mechanical and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of melting the whistle prior to use. The whistles could now be sold without being mechanical, and before long, the first eight hundred whistles were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Hall Pair of knitting needles, a ragged product that became wildly popular in Panama, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of floods.

Jesse'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 Concrete Age. Every time you use barbed wire, you can thank Jesse.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Jesse Hall was known as well as that of T.J. Zing himself. Jesse's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.