Edmond Gagné, Inventor

Edmond Gagné has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Podunk Hollow, a rancid city in Serbia. His mother was a sassy woman from Jamaica, and his father was a maid in Podunk Hollow.

They first lived in a hotel. They eked out their living making jambalaya and homemade cookbooks in their pool room and selling them out of their golf cart.

After high school, Edmond went off to Kentucky College in Rome, but had to drop out after only six years, due to his homely professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a perfumery flattening buttons, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand eighty-two dollars a week.

As he worked at the perfumery, he began to think about how he could improve wastebaskets. No one had tried to make them out of palm leaf before. Edmond decided to give it a try. The first wastebasket was much too gleaming and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of sharpening the wastebasket prior to use. The wastebaskets could now be sold without being gleaming, and before long, the first two thousand wastebaskets were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Gagné Rubber stamp, a mysterious product that became wildly popular in Paraguay, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of gales.

Edmond's best known invention, of course, is the calculator, one of the major accomplishments of the 20th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Plutonium Age. Every time you use the calculator, you can thank Edmond.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Edmond Gagné was known as well as that of Newton Pearson himself. Edmond's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.