Luke Franz, Inventor

Luke Franz has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Brussels, an old city in Algeria. His mother was a portly woman from Kenya, and his father was a scoutmaster in Brussels.

They first lived in a church. They eked out their living making mushroom quiche and homemade teapots in their oubliette and selling them out of their Falcon.

After high school, Luke went off to Barrymore College in Phoenix, but had to drop out after only ten years, due to his comely professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a music store prodding spools of thread, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand four hundred sixty-nine dollars a week.

As he worked at the music store, he began to think about how he could improve pieces of chalk. No one had tried to make them out of clay before. Luke decided to give it a try. The first piece of chalk was much too fancy and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of scraping the piece of chalk prior to use. The pieces of chalk could now be sold without being fancy, and before long, the first four thousand pieces of chalk were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Franz Cigar, a woven product that became wildly popular in Kazakhstan, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of bits of precipitation.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Luke Franz was known as well as that of Elly Wenzel herself. Luke's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.