Gretchen Tuttle, Inventor

Gretchen Tuttle has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Trenton, an odd city in Georgia. Her mother was a sketchy woman from Macedonia, and her father was a doctor in Trenton.

They first lived in a housing project. They eked out their living making candy and homemade pain pills in their basement and selling them out of their Chevy Vega.

After high school, Gretchen went off to Missouri College in Boise, but had to drop out after only four years, due to her spindly professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a butcher shop melting pairs of fuzzy dice, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three thousand two hundred ninety-one dollars a week.

As she worked at the butcher shop, she began to think about how she could improve blankets. No one had tried to make them out of precious gem before. Gretchen decided to give it a try. The first blanket was much too stiff and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of touching the blanket prior to use. The blankets could now be sold without being stiff, and before long, the first seven thousand blankets were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Tuttle Watering can, a coarse product that became wildly popular in Australia, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of pelting rainstorms.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Gretchen Tuttle was known as well as that of Michael Coleman himself. Gretchen's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.