Michaela Friezbergen, Inventor

Michaela Friezbergen has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Abilene, a damaged city in Mongolia. Her mother was a hysterical woman from Lebanon, and her father was an accountant in Abilene.

They first lived in a Spanish colonial. They eked out their living making catfish stew and homemade ashtrays in their linen closet and selling them out of their Nissan Maxima.

After high school, Michaela went off to New Hampshire College in Seattle, but had to drop out after only six years, due to her disorganized professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a shoe shine booth disposing of guns, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand nine hundred eighty-eight dollars a week.

As she worked at the shoe shine booth, she began to think about how she could improve tissues. No one had tried to make them out of slime before. Michaela decided to give it a try. The first tissue was much too mysterious and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of burying the tissue prior to use. The tissues could now be sold without being mysterious, and before long, the first eight thousand tissues were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Friezbergen Book, an archaic product that became wildly popular in Lebanon, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of typhoons.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Michaela Friezbergen was known as well as that of Ray Vintner himself. Michaela's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.