Martha Comstad, Inventor

Martha Comstad has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Cairo, a gooey city in Uganda. Her mother was a blubbery woman from Austria, and her father was a warehouse picker in Cairo.

They first lived in a trough. They eked out their living making ramen noodles and homemade vases in their study and selling them out of their dump truck.

After high school, Martha went off to Wyoming College in Mexico City, but had to drop out after only ten years, due to her careful professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a mortuary scuffing flash drives, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four thousand two hundred sixty-nine dollars a week.

As she worked at the mortuary, she began to think about how she could improve dog collars. No one had tried to make them out of papier-mâché before. Martha decided to give it a try. The first dog collar was much too stuffed and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of squashing the dog collar prior to use. The dog collars could now be sold without being stuffed, and before long, the first six thousand dog collars were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Comstad Ping-pong paddle, a gruesome product that became wildly popular in El Salvador, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of periods of warm weather.

Martha's best known invention, of course, is television, one of the major accomplishments of the 20th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Gingerbread Age. Every time you use television, you can thank Martha.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Martha Comstad was known as well as that of Lex Wales himself. Martha's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.