Matthew Peña, Inventor

Matthew Peña has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Edinburgh, a chic city in Mongolia. His mother was an excitable woman from Haiti, and his father was a crime scene investigator in Edinburgh.

They first lived in a hut. They eked out their living making popcorn and homemade baskets in their corridor and selling them out of their Ford Pinto.

After high school, Matthew went off to North Carolina College in Detroit, but had to drop out after only two years, due to his heavyset professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a bar punching hammers, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one hundred three dollars a week.

As he worked at the bar, he began to think about how he could improve statues. No one had tried to make them out of bubble before. Matthew decided to give it a try. The first statue was much too speckled and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of blessing the statue prior to use. The statues could now be sold without being speckled, and before long, the first four thousand statues were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Peña Notebook, a prickly product that became wildly popular in Laos, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of earthquakes.

Matthew's best known invention, of course, is the razor, one of the major accomplishments of the 21st Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Vinyl Age. Every time you use the razor, you can thank Matthew.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Matthew Peña was known as well as that of Greg Rudnick himself. Matthew's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.