Many of our competition winners submitted multiple entries – they’re inventing all the time!

Most famous inventors started when they were kids. They may not have had their breakthrough inventions when they were kids, but they sure started asking questions and thinking up new ways to do things when they were young.

James Jorasch
James is on our Board of Directors and boy is he a serial inventor! He is named inventor on more than 200 issued patents! He heads up the inventing group at a high tech think tank and plays tournament chess, poker, backgammon, and Scrabble. His patents cover fields such as telecommunications, financial services, electronic commerce, retail systems, videogames, lottery, casino gaming, healthcare, and vending.


Nicholas Fornario
Nicholas is one of our kid inventors who just keeps coming up with new ideas. At the age of 8, Nicholas’s Aunt burned herself while cooking bacon on the stove. The grease splattered up and burnt her arm. He saw the problem and created a device that would include both gloves and utensils in one.

Beulah Henry
Beulah Henry has been called "the lady Edison" because of her relentless pursuit of inventive thinking. In 1912 she developed her first of over a hundred patented inventions – a vacuum ice cream freezer. You can also thank Ms. Henry for improvements to typewriters, early concepts of duplicating written documents, and bobbin-free sewing machines. She invented for herself and for companies who hired her to make improvements to their existing products. She was very smart and very rich – she founded a number of manufacturing companies to produce her creations.

John Holahan, Cereal Inventor
John Holahan was a vice president at General Mills in 1963 when he invented one of kids’ all time favorite cereals - Lucky Charms. Holahan claimed to have gotten the idea for the cereal from Circus Peanuts. Holahan cut up several of the marshmallow sweets and sprinkled them over Cheerios, and he "knew we had a winner.”