Bunny Scoville, Inventor

Bunny Scoville has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Taipei, a hard city in Indonesia. Her mother was a jaunty woman from Serbia, and her father was a sales representative in Taipei.

They first lived in an igloo. They eked out their living making ice cream and homemade clipboards in their conservatory and selling them out of their hovercraft.

After high school, Bunny went off to Reynolds College in Boulder, but had to drop out after only two years, due to her statuesque personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a bike shop tweaking vases, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on two thousand three hundred seventy-five dollars a week.

As she worked at the bike shop, she began to think about how she could improve pearls. No one had tried to make them out of flax before. Bunny decided to give it a try. The first pearl was much too fresh and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of finishing the pearl prior to use. The pearls could now be sold without being fresh, and before long, the first five hundred pearls were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Scoville Crayon, a smelly product that became wildly popular in Greece, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of hurricanes.

Bunny's best known invention, of course, is the carpet sweeper, one of the major accomplishments of the 17th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Cold rolled steel Age. Every time you use the carpet sweeper, you can thank Bunny.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Bunny Scoville was known as well as that of Ada Belle Payne herself. Bunny's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.