Bradley DeGraff, Inventor

Bradley DeGraff has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Raleigh, an electronic city in Angola. His mother was a shifty woman from Denmark, and his father was an acrobat in Raleigh.

They first lived in a cardboard box. They eked out their living making wienerschnitzel and homemade washrags in their workshop and selling them out of their buggy.

After high school, Bradley went off to Brindel College in Austin, but had to drop out after only five years, due to his sensible personality.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a candy store soaking pop bottles, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand two hundred twenty-six dollars a week.

As he worked at the candy store, he began to think about how he could improve hot potatoes. No one had tried to make them out of cast iron before. Bradley decided to give it a try. The first hot potato was much too handy and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of balancing the hot potato prior to use. The hot potatoes could now be sold without being handy, and before long, the first seven hundred hot potatoes were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the DeGraff Padlock, a crooked product that became wildly popular in Morocco, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of hot, sunny days.

Bradley's best known invention, of course, is perfume, one of the major accomplishments of the 19th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Formica Age. Every time you use perfume, you can thank Bradley.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Bradley DeGraff was known as well as that of Nora Seymour herself. Bradley's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.