Mr. Vanderbulge was a wealthy man who owned a large art collection in his mansion. His prized possession was the Vanderbulge Star Sapphire, which was supposedly the most valuable sapphire in the world. Being wealthy, he boasted that he was a "big man" in the town he lived in, and often bragged about his engineering skills, as he was the man who invented his own burglar security and alarm system. In any case, he wasn't a "big man" for long, after the arrival of Doctor Hiram Gulliver, who used his handheld minimizer to shrink him to two-inches tall, and then "borrowed" his star sapphire.