Elena Pope, Inventor

Elena Pope has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Salt Lake City, a loose city in Namibia. Her mother was a sensible woman from Argentina, and her father was a telephone operator in Salt Lake City.

They first lived in a mansion. They eked out their living making beans and homemade hedge trimmers in their library and selling them out of their wood-paneled station wagon.

After high school, Elena went off to Simpson College in Bonn, but had to drop out after only two years, due to her furious professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a souvenir shop protecting tubes of glue, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand seven hundred fourteen dollars a week.

As she worked at the souvenir shop, she began to think about how she could improve coffee pots. No one had tried to make them out of rammed earth before. Elena decided to give it a try. The first coffee pot was much too frilly and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of liquifying the coffee pot prior to use. The coffee pots could now be sold without being frilly, and before long, the first seven thousand coffee pots were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Pope Chair, an ornate product that became wildly popular in Mexico, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of dense fogs.

Elena's best known invention, of course, is the refrigerator, one of the major accomplishments of the 18th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Onyx Age. Every time you use the refrigerator, you can thank Elena.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Elena Pope was known as well as that of Helen Adams herself. Elena's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.