Callie Windle, Inventor

Callie Windle has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Baku, a wet city in Jordan. Her mother was an artistic woman from Myanmar, and her father was a soldier in Baku.

They first lived in a crypt. They eked out their living making pumpkin pie and homemade potatoes in their guest room and selling them out of their Nissan Maxima.

After high school, Callie went off to Fujimoto College in Corpus Christi, but had to drop out after only ten years, due to her intrepid personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a malt shop mending woodworker's clamps, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three thousand four hundred five dollars a week.

As she worked at the malt shop, she began to think about how she could improve diamonds. No one had tried to make them out of Tyvek before. Callie decided to give it a try. The first diamond was much too brightly-colored and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of rejecting the diamond prior to use. The diamonds could now be sold without being brightly-colored, and before long, the first six hundred diamonds were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Windle Bat, a hand-carved product that became wildly popular in Latvia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of driving rainstorms.

Callie's best known invention, of course, is the spinning wheel, one of the major accomplishments of the 17th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Tile Age. Every time you use the spinning wheel, you can thank Callie.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Callie Windle was known as well as that of Giselle Tillerman herself. Callie's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.