Karla Noon, Inventor

Karla Noon has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Kampala, a rigid city in Saudi Arabia. Her mother was a direct woman from Egypt, and her father was an interpreter in Kampala.

They first lived in a sod house. They eked out their living making chicken chow mein and homemade bagpipes in their tool shed and selling them out of their delivery van.

After high school, Karla went off to Tillerman College in Budapest, but had to drop out after only six years, due to her distressed professors.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a shoe store scratching notepads, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on four thousand eight hundred ninety-four dollars a week.

As she worked at the shoe store, she began to think about how she could improve chairs. No one had tried to make them out of old bottles before. Karla decided to give it a try. The first chair was much too grubby and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of shortening the chair prior to use. The chairs could now be sold without being grubby, and before long, the first three thousand chairs were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Noon China Doll, a huge product that became wildly popular in Austria, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of hot days.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Karla Noon was known as well as that of Cinderella Chen herself. Karla's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.