Penny Weatherford, Inventor

Penny Weatherford has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Grand Rapids, a new city in Lithuania. Her mother was a sweet woman from Kosovo, and her father was a physical therapist in Grand Rapids.

They first lived in a skyscraper. They eked out their living making blueberry pie and homemade orchids in their kitchen and selling them out of their Acura.

After high school, Penny went off to Zmarzly College in Sapporo, but had to drop out after only seven years, due to her menacing personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a coffee shop mending piggy banks, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four thousand three hundred ninety-one dollars a week.

As she worked at the coffee shop, she began to think about how she could improve stopwatches. No one had tried to make them out of rock before. Penny decided to give it a try. The first stopwatch was much too polka-dotted and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of blaming the stopwatch prior to use. The stopwatches could now be sold without being polka-dotted, and before long, the first seven hundred stopwatches were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Weatherford Protest sign, a filthy product that became wildly popular in Belize, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of lightning storms.

Penny's best known invention, of course, is Coca-Cola, one of the major accomplishments of the 20th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Lath and plaster Age. Every time you use Coca-Cola, you can thank Penny.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Penny Weatherford was known as well as that of Kim Weinstein herself. Penny's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.