It was 2003, and after 9/11, a sudden increase in security checkpoints at airports was leading to extremely long wait times for travelers.
It was 15-year-old Josh Pfluger, who was in the final stages of becoming an Eagle Scout who decided that his project would best serve the community by lessening the wait time at OHare International Airport.
So, he and his fellow scouts went into his Rockford, Illinois garage, and started designing a device to detect metal that wasn’t supposed to be present in shoes.
The homemade invention was simple yet intuitive. A box with a metal detector – letting passengers know if their shoes will trigger alarms when they get to the gate…