Stuart Bates, Inventor

Stuart Bates has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Mogadishu, a wet city in Poland. His mother was a selfish woman from Kuwait, and his father was a winemaker in Mogadishu.

They first lived in a chapel. They eked out their living making chopped liver and homemade remote controls in their outhouse and selling them out of their Suburu Forester.

After high school, Stuart went off to Spangler College in Buffalo, but had to drop out after only six years, due to his agile professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a barbershop biting file folders, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand seven hundred twenty-seven dollars a week.

As he worked at the barbershop, he began to think about how he could improve oriental vases. No one had tried to make them out of plastic before. Stuart decided to give it a try. The first oriental vase was much too smelly and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of photographing the oriental vase prior to use. The oriental vases could now be sold without being smelly, and before long, the first five thousand oriental vases were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Bates Backpack, an odd product that became wildly popular in Haiti, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of tornadoes.

Stuart's best known invention, of course, is the contact lens, one of the major accomplishments of the 17th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Old tire Age. Every time you use the contact lens, you can thank Stuart.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Stuart Bates was known as well as that of Marybel Seymour herself. Stuart's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.