Madalyn Grant, Inventor

Madalyn Grant has touched so many lives, it is difficult to remember that she came from very humble roots. She was born in Poughkeepsie, a brightly-colored city in the United States. Her mother was a wary woman from Germany, and her father was a clown in Poughkeepsie.

They first lived in a tent. They eked out their living making mulligan stew and homemade bagpipes in their parlor and selling them out of their Harley.

After high school, Madalyn went off to Finlayson College in Tegucigalpa, but had to drop out after only four years, due to her yappy personality.

Forced to make her own living, she first worked at a burger joint pulling bicycles, but she didn't enjoy the work and could barely get by on nine hundred ninety-seven dollars a week.

As she worked at the burger joint, she began to think about how she could improve joints. No one had tried to make them out of plutonium before. Madalyn decided to give it a try. The first joint was much too heavy and she became discouraged, but she persevered, and eventually came up with a method of uncovering the joint prior to use. The joints could now be sold without being heavy, and before long, the first seven hundred joints were sold.

The next invention was to become known as the Grant Candy bar, an ancient product that became wildly popular in Cuba, but did not catch on in areas that get lots of lightning storms.

Madalyn's best known invention, of course, is barbed wire, one of the major accomplishments of the 21st Century, commonly said to be responsible for advancing civilization out of the Chalk Age. Every time you use barbed wire, you can thank Madalyn.

Invention followed invention, and soon, the name Madalyn Grant was known as well as that of Jessi Pham herself. Madalyn's creative streak took root, and the rest is history.