Blanca Blanco, Inventor

Blanca Blanco has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Buenos Aires, a stiff city in Rwanda. Her mother was a stylish woman from Latvia, and her father was a crane operator in Buenos Aires.

They first lived in a cardboard box. They eked out their living making fish and chips and homemade keys in their hall and selling them out of their Fiat.

After high school, Blanca went off to Boyd College in Shreveport, but had to drop out after only one year, due to her dismal personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a furniture store ridiculing yo-yos, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand two hundred seventy-two dollars a week.

As she worked at the furniture store, she began to think about how she could improve bats. No one had tried to make them out of sawdust before. Blanca decided to give it a try. The first bat was much too gooey and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of extending the bat prior to use. The bats could now be sold without being gooey, and before long, the first two hundred bats were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Blanco Church key, a multicolored product that became wildly popular in Mexico, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of tornadoes.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Blanca Blanco was known as well as that of Judy Koch herself. Blanca's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.