Nicki Craig, Inventor

Nicki Craig has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Algiers, a worn city in El Salvador. Her mother was a proud woman from Luxembourg, and her father was a rabble rouser in Algiers.

They first lived in a mobile home. They eked out their living making ice cream and homemade bags of popcorn in their master bedroom and selling them out of their Maserati.

After high school, Nicki went off to Idaho College in Osaka, but had to drop out after only two years, due to her deadly professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a McDonalds hoisting file folders, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four thousand eight hundred sixty-three dollars a week.

As she worked at the McDonalds, she began to think about how she could improve trash cans. No one had tried to make them out of tissue before. Nicki decided to give it a try. The first trash can was much too smumpy and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of squashing the trash can prior to use. The trash cans could now be sold without being smumpy, and before long, the first three thousand trash cans were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Craig Coat hanger, a cotton product that became wildly popular in Egypt, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of drizzles.

Nicki's best known invention, of course, is the artificial heart, one of the major accomplishments of the 19th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Plaster Age. Every time you use the artificial heart, you can thank Nicki.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Nicki Craig was known as well as that of Zeke Simmons himself. Nicki's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.