The inventor who lived large and spent big
Peter Florjancic once said that even Alfred Hitchcock would be hardpressed to work his life story into a movie. By trade he was an inventor, whose hundreds of creations included a cigarette lighter with a side-mounted ignition that he sold to Dunhill, a compact perfume sprayer bought by Elizabeth Arden, lightweight plastic ice skates, a skiing treadmill, and plastic photographic slide frames that sold by the millions. Florjancic applied the same whimsy and eye for opportunity that he credited with his inventing success to his own life, an unlikely tale that included competing at the Olympics; escaping from the Nazis; appearing on film alongside Marlene Dietrich; hobnobbing with Winston Churchill, Salvador Dalí, and Brigitte Bardot; and earning and frittering away multiple fortunes. “I’ve had five citizenships, 43 cars, and the longest passport,” he said. “I had seven houses, and I squandered it all. But I had a great time.”
Florjancic was born in Bled, Slovenia, a lakeside ski resort where his parents ran a hotel, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). “A precocious child,” he crafted his first invention at age 6: a shirtsleeve protector for nose wiping. At 16, he joined the Yugoslav ski-jumping team and competed in the 1936 Winter Olympics. At 18, he opened a textile mill and became “the official supplier of cloth” to Yugoslavia’s royal family, said The Times (U.K.). After the Nazis invaded in 1941, he was “conscripted to fight in the German army.” Instead, he and a friend fled to Austria, “faked their deaths in an avalanche, and crossed the border into Switzerland,” landing in a refugee camp in Bern.
There, “he made his first real breakthrough,” said BBC.com. He designed “a weaving machine that could be used by disabled people” and sold the patent for 100,000 Swiss francs, which he promptly blew at a resort in St. Moritz. After meeting and marrying a former model in Zurich, he landed in Monte Carlo, where he formed a business partnership with an Egyptian royal and became a fixture on the glittering social scene. Living in France, Italy, and Germany before returning to his hometown, he “worked into his 90s,” writing several books. He’d failed to save for retirement, but that was of little concern to him. “Gold lies on the streets, and you just need to dig it up with ideas,” he said. “Ideas are like the shovel.”