When a guy sells his Rolex, Porsche 911 and a villa in Florida to spend three years sitting on floor of a one-bedroom apartment and using a milk crate as a makeshift desk, he'd better be working on something important. Dan Didrick's payoff for all his hard work is the X-Finger prosthetic finger, said to be the first non-robotic prosthetic digit that can curl up just like a real finger. It needs only a small stub to work, with a small lever inside that responds to the movement of the stub.

Didrick first started making prosthetic fingers while living in Japan, shaping silicon into non-moving fingers for factory workers who'd lost fingers in accidents. When he moved back to the states, he started working on a prosthetic finger for a deaf woman he knew who needed a finger in order to do sign language. In the years that followed, he lost track of the woman but pursued his designs on behalf of soldiers who'd lost fingers in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The finished product recently won second place in a national invention contest sponsored by the History Channel and the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation. Now comes the hard part: Didrick needs to raise $11 million so his company, Didrick Medical, can make enough of the $10,000-per-finger devices. And, hopefully, get himself a real desk. — Tony Kontzer

Naples Daily News, via New Launches