Jim Boelke tests out the Cat Dancer toy at the Oshkosh Area Humane Society in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

NEENAH, Wis. — As a cash-strapped university student in the late 1970s, Jim Boelke had an idea and applied for a patent — and today he owns a profitable factory with distribution from Japan and Hong Kong to Europe, South America and every state in the U.S.

Boelke’s closest collaborators, however, were never venture capitalists, postgraduate researchers or Web developers. He owes much of his success to Jake and Elwood, two cats whose lives he saved when he was in college. The felines returned the favor by inspiring Boelke to invent one of the most popular toys in all of catdom: the Cat Dancer, a simple 3-foot length of bouncy steel wire, tipped at the ends with twisted stubs of cardboard ($2.99 at many pet stores).

Even the laziest cats are known to get airborne and do backflips when a human holds the wire by one end and lets the twists of cardboard at the other end bob tantalizingly like a fly or moth.

“It’s inexpensive and it works,” Cat Fancy magazine wrote in 1995, when it inducted the Cat Dancer into its Hall of Fame.

In the process of shipping more than 12 million Cat Dancers — and nearly as many of the other cat toys he has invented over the years — Boelke became an authority on the vast market for products that indulge the nation’s most popular pet.

If Boelke’s business is any indication, the global cat economy is purring along. “Last year was our best year ever, and this year we are up 15 percent over that,” said Boelke, who declines to disclose revenue or other financial data from his privately held business.

Boelke never set out to be an entrepreneur, much less an inventor. His story began when he held multiple jobs to work his way through the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

One of those jobs was at an animal shelter that had too few cages, too few adoptions and far too many drop-offs.

“Most animals in the pound were euthanized,” he said. Finally, he couldn’t stand by any longer and impetuously rescued two cats, taking them to the house he rented with a handful of other students.

Another of his part-time jobs involved sweeping up scrap metal from a factory floor. One night he came across a discarded section of 20-gauge steel wire, which by chance had small strips of cardboard attached. “I picked it up. It was bouncy and flopped around,” he recalled. That, he said, was his “moment of epiphany.”

He took the simple contraption home to test his idea. “My cats literally started doing backflips.”

The inventor is now 60 and says he has ideas for additional toys. But Max has come and gone, and so have Buddy, Spike and Otis. After living without a cat for the last two years, Boelke recently adopted a striped gray kitten named Cooper. “I’m thinking of getting him a brother.”