It all began like this: Ted Knight was a bored man. Wealthy and brilliant, but bored. Born into the creme de la creme of his beloved Opal City, he was made heir of his family's massive fortunes at his coming of age. Despite deeply loving Opal, he found its upper echelons drab and dull beyond measure. he preferred to console himself by pouring as much as he could into his great love: astronomy. In time, his hard work paid off and he made a great discovery: stars were not only cosmic furnaces, but even radiated immense energy waves into space, energy that had gone unnoticed for aeons. His only regret was that he had no means of harnessing the energy. All that changed when his cousin, Sandra Knight, informed him of a scientist named Abraham Davis, who was on his way to producing a device she hoped to use to escape the same monotony Ted loathed: adding to the burgeoning ranks of the superheroes of the day. Intrigued, Ted visited Davis himself and both worked for months before producing a single golden rod of Art Déco style: the singular weapon Ted called the Gravity Rod.