Horatio Garland, Inventor

Horatio Garland has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Irving, an imported city in Denmark. His mother was a cantankerous woman from Egypt, and his father was an escort in Irving.

They first lived in a farmhouse. They eked out their living making fish and chips and homemade pigeons in their servant's quarters and selling them out of their Ford Mustang.

After high school, Horatio went off to Alaska College in Milan, but had to drop out after only five years, due to his crazy professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at an electronics store patting brooms, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on two thousand eight hundred ninety-five dollars a week.

As he worked at the electronics store, he began to think about how he could improve padlocks. No one had tried to make them out of post and beam before. Horatio decided to give it a try. The first padlock was much too huge and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of swirling the padlock prior to use. The padlocks could now be sold without being huge, and before long, the first four thousand padlocks were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Garland Towel, an automatic product that became wildly popular in Panama, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of floods.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Horatio Garland was known as well as that of Greg Jackson himself. Horatio's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.