Being raised on a farm in Iowa, I learned at an early age to use my creative ideas to make things work. I continued to learn and expand my knowledge at Iowa State University graduating in 1970 with an Electrical Engineering degree. For the next 31 years I worked for Alcoa as an engineer designing and working on many different projects. In my retirement I continued to work as a consulting engineer and currently work in engineering full time for a local company.
In 1998 we decided to by an 1880’s house in the historic district of Davenport. This brought many new challenges and projects. Living in an older home with an original field stone foundation brought the challenge of controlling the number of mice we had wanting to cohabitate with us. This was not a good working relationship. About 4 years ago we had a mouse that I just couldn’t catch with the usual snap trap. The more times he got away, the more frustrated I became until I finally had had enough. I told my wife there must be a better way to catch mice and so the idea for Micro-Mousetrap was born. I spent time on a wooden box with a light sensor that would set off the trap. This crude box was placed under the kitchen sink before we sent to bed. The next morning, I checked the box and the mouse had been caught. I reset the trap and another mouse was caught. I decided this was working well so made more and started giving them to family and friends to use. Everyone was so excited that they were catching mice that I decided to make a commercial product and the Micro-Mousetrap was created.
When we started selling the mousetrap, we were getting requests for a larger trap to catch rats. Now Micro-Rat-trap is available for purchase.
