AeroPress inventor and engineer Alan Adler has been honing his inventing skills since he was 13 years old. That was when he came up with an idea for a useful tool: an electronic device for measuring minute displacements in structures. When he described his invention to an engineer, the engineer was flabbergasted to hear that a 13 year old had invented it. He told Alan that his creation was an existing device called a "strain gage" that had been invented the year Alan was born! So began Alan's lifelong inventing streak.
In Alan's early career he worked as an electrical engineer designing systems for high tech companies. He was fascinated by sailboats and taught himself aerodynamics so that he could learn to design them. His studies led him to design a radically light boat he called the Fast-40 which became a production series manufactured in Rockland, Maine. Alan also designed a 60-foot racing ketch he called Etosha, which was the first monohull to finish in the 1998 Singlehanded TransPacific Race from San Francisco to Hawaii.