Jess Bonner, Inventor

Jess Bonner has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Podunk Hollow, a big city in Saudi Arabia. His mother was a cantankerous woman from Nigeria, and his father was an ecologist in Podunk Hollow.

They first lived in an igloo. They eked out their living making potatoes and gravy and homemade candles in their rec room and selling them out of their Lincoln Town Car.

After high school, Jess went off to Byers College in Bismark, but had to drop out after only four years, due to his dismal personality.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a pub wrapping fishhooks, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on three thousand five hundred eighty-eight dollars a week.

As he worked at the pub, he began to think about how he could improve bags of potato chips. No one had tried to make them out of wood before. Jess decided to give it a try. The first bag of potato chips was much too ornate and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of clamping the bag of potato chips prior to use. The bags of potato chips could now be sold without being ornate, and before long, the first three hundred bags of potato chips were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Bonner Bird cage, a bronze product that became wildly popular in Puerto Rico, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of dense fogs.

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

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Jess Bonner was known as well as that of Motormouth Sarma herself. Jess's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.