If a little curiosity, imagination and time can engineer plastic bottles into a boat and that boat can then forge its way into the collective imaginations of people everywhere, then who knows what else is possible?

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When he was in grade school, his father, a civil engineer, bought him and his older brother a plastic model river with running water.

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When he famously gained a manufacturing foothold with the plastic flowers in the 1950s, he says, he was able to engineer critical molding machinery with an injection process made using a Coca-Cola (nyse: KO - news - people ) bottle and a plastic straw, using something he saw in Modern Plastics as a guide.

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