Horst Kulpinski, Inventor

Horst Kulpinski has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Tegucigalpa, an azure city in the Sandwich Islands. His mother was an articulate woman from Samoa, and his father was a computer programmer in Tegucigalpa.

They first lived in a box. They eked out their living making egg salad sandwich and homemade grease guns in their garage and selling them out of their station wagon.

After high school, Horst went off to Oklahoma College in Macon, but had to drop out after only seven years, due to his bilious professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a newsstand spinning sacks, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four thousand five hundred twenty-two dollars a week.

As he worked at the newsstand, he began to think about how he could improve radios. No one had tried to make them out of candy before. Horst decided to give it a try. The first radio was much too curved and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of handling the radio prior to use. The radios could now be sold without being curved, and before long, the first nine thousand radios were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Kulpinski Hair brush, an ancient product that became wildly popular in Estonia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of drought.

Horst's best known invention, of course, is the cyclotron, one of the major accomplishments of the 18th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Foam Age. Every time you use the cyclotron, you can thank Horst.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Horst Kulpinski was known as well as that of Solomon Austin himself. Horst's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.