Chester Greenwood

A Maine Inventor

Chester Greenwood grew up in Farmington, Maine. Maine winters are very severe and harsh. At times there could be hail, ice cubes falling down from the sky.
On his fifteenth birthday Chester Greenwood got a pair of ice skates. He wanted to try them out so he ran to the pond and put on his skates. He tried them out but in a few minutes his ears started to turn blue from the cold!
Chester decided to create something to keep his ears warm. He took beaver fur with black velvet and asked his grandmother to sew them together. He bent some wire and asked his mom to hook the wire onto the beaver fur. His mom sewed the wire onto his hat. Chester had invented the earmuffs.
The earmuffs changed peoples lives by keeping their ears cozy and warm in harsh weather. It allowed people to stay outside in cold weather longer.
By the time he was nineteen, in 1877 had upgraded his earmuffs, had them patented, and he was making them in a factory in Farmington. Farmington was soon the “earmuff capital of the world!”