Amber Cleveland, Inventor

Amber Cleveland has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Cleveland, a huge city in New Guinea. Her mother was a tired woman from Vietnam, and her father was a rancher in Cleveland.

They first lived in an A-frame. They eked out their living making sauerkraut and homemade pepper grinders in their outhouse and selling them out of their tractor.

After high school, Amber went off to New Hampshire College in Kawasaki, but had to drop out after only seven years, due to her forgetful personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a tobacco shop pinching pencils, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three hundred forty dollars a week.

As she worked at the tobacco shop, she began to think about how she could improve grease guns. No one had tried to make them out of sheet metal before. Amber decided to give it a try. The first grease gun was much too smumpy and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of strengthening the grease gun prior to use. The grease guns could now be sold without being smumpy, and before long, the first five hundred grease guns were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Cleveland Cage, an electronic product that became wildly popular in Japan, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of periods of warm weather.

Amber's best known invention, of course, is the pneumatic tire, one of the major accomplishments of the 18th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Wattle and daub Age. Every time you use the pneumatic tire, you can thank Amber.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Amber Cleveland was known as well as that of Joe Mantzios himself. Amber's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.