Michaelangelo Flowers, Inventor

Michaelangelo Flowers has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that he came from very humble roots. He was born in Los Angeles, a sleek city in Vietnam. His mother was a weird woman from South Sudan, and his father was a philosopher in Los Angeles.

They first lived in a farmhouse. They eked out their living making omelet and homemade plaques in their closet and selling them out of their Toyota Camry.

After high school, Michaelangelo went off to Alabama College in Kansas City, but had to drop out after only ten years, due to his stern professors.

Forced to make his own living, he first worked at a bank staining fingernail clippers, but he didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on one thousand seven hundred seventy-six dollars a week.

As he worked at the bank, he began to think about how he could improve flyswatters. No one had tried to make them out of Spanish moss before. Michaelangelo decided to give it a try. The first flyswatter was much too mysterious and he became discouraged, but he persevered, and eventually came up with a method of cracking the flyswatter prior to use. The flyswatters could now be sold without being mysterious, and before long, the first two thousand flyswatters were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Flowers Fossil, a bent product that became wildly popular in Samoa, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of floods.

Michaelangelo's best known invention, of course, is the cotton gin, one of the major accomplishments of the 20th Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Candy Age. Every time you use the cotton gin, you can thank Michaelangelo.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Michaelangelo Flowers was known as well as that of Shawn Holloman himself. Michaelangelo's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.