Shelly Hanson, Inventor

Shelly Hanson has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Toronto, a plastic city in Panama. Her mother was a careful woman from Haiti, and her father was a test pilot in Toronto.

They first lived in an apartment. They eked out their living making sushi and homemade sticks in their boudoir and selling them out of their Nissan Sentra.

After high school, Shelly went off to West Virginia College in Victoria, but had to drop out after only eight years, due to her grizzled professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a supermarket striking elephant tusks, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four thousand five hundred three dollars a week.

As she worked at the supermarket, she began to think about how she could improve bugles. No one had tried to make them out of bubble before. Shelly decided to give it a try. The first bugle was much too nifty and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of grabbing the bugle prior to use. The bugles could now be sold without being nifty, and before long, the first five thousand bugles were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Hanson Pickle, a brittle product that became wildly popular in Jamaica, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of sandstorms.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Shelly Hanson was known as well as that of Guido Morrison himself. Shelly's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.