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Top 20 countdown: Innovations in Chicago that changed the world By James Janega , Blue Sky Reporter Nov. 7, 2013, 11:10 a.m. When we consider Chicago’s future, we evoke its past. So we’ve put together a Top 20 list of innovations that Chicago can claim since its beginnings on a frontier crossroad. We’ll top off the list till we reach No. 1 in the coming weeks. We invite you to read along, tell us what we might have overlooked, challenge our findings — some of which are based on rough historical accounts that may border on myth. We encourage your suggestions, questions and ideas. It’s all part of drawing from the past to solve the future. – The Blue Sky team #1: The nuclear reaction (1942) The world entered the nuclear age on a clear, chilly Saturday afternoon in Chicago. It was the third year of the Second World War: German troops had dug in at Stalingrad, U.S. troops had landed in north Africa, and, inside a pile of black bricks and wooden timbers stacked under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s abandoned football field, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi directed young George Weil to pull out the final graphite rod slowing runaway neutrons as they fizzed off pellets of unstable uranium. True to his calculations, the Uranium-235 inside Chicago Pile-1 heated up and went critical. The world’s first self-sustaining controlled nuclear

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Top 20 countdown: Innovations in Chicago that changed the world

By James Janega, Blue Sky ReporterNov. 7, 2013, 11:10 a.m.

When we consider Chicago’s future, we evoke its past. So we’ve put together a Top 20 list of innovations that

Chicago can claim since its beginnings on a frontier crossroad. We’ll top off the list till we reach No. 1 in the

coming weeks. We invite you to read along, tell us what we might have overlooked, challenge our findings —

some of which are based on rough historical accounts that may border on myth. We encourage your

suggestions, questions and ideas. It’s all part of drawing from the past to solve the future.

– The Blue Sky team

#1: The nuclear reaction (1942)The world entered the nuclear age on a clear, chilly Saturday afternoon in Chicago. It was the third year of the

Second World War: German troops had dug in at Stalingrad, U.S. troops had landed in north Africa, and, inside

a pile of black bricks and wooden timbers stacked under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s

abandoned football field, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi directed young George Weil to pull out the final

graphite rod slowing runaway neutrons as they fizzed off pellets of unstable uranium.

True to his calculations, the Uranium-235 inside Chicago Pile-1 heated up and went critical. The world’s first

self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction began — clearing a path for the atomic bomb, nuclear power plants

and the nuclear proliferation.

The time was 3:25 p.m., Dec. 2, 1942. Speeding free neutrons flaked off still more free neutrons, each excited

particle cracking more uranium nuclei apart as a group of the world’s top physicists looked on.

For 28 minutes, atoms split.

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Fermi had theorized and experimented in the 1930s with radioactive decay in thorium and uranium. Hungarian

immigrant Leo Szilard had conceived of nuclear chain reactions in 1933 and patented the notion of a nuclear

with Fermi.

The Hungarian also was credited with writing most of the letter to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

signed by Szilard’s former academic supervisor — and world’s most famous scientist — Albert Einstein.

Einstein’s letter warned atomic fission and nuclear bombs were just around the scientific corner and that Nazi

Germany was mining Czechoslovakian uranium.

Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bombs that the U.S. used against Japan,

set off the cold war against the Soviet Union and ushered in an era of civilian nuclear power that keeps the

lights on for millions around the world — and still scares the daylights out of many more.

The first fission reaction occurred in strict secrecy — and under the nose of one of America’s most populous

cities.

On that Saturday afternoon in 1942, the trim Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Compton, head of the

Manhattan Project, reported the news to James Conant, the White House’s hand-picked, horn-rimmed, Ivy

League chairman of the National Defense Research Committee.

“The Italian navigator has landed in the New World,” the scientist told Roosevelt’s man by telephone.

“How were the natives?” Conant asked in reply.

“Very friendly,” Compton told him.

Accounts say the impromptu code was the only part of the operation that hadn’t been planned in advance.

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#2: The Skyscraper (1884)Until architect and engineer William Le Baron Jenney’s novel solution to reduce construction materials, cities

could only get as big as they had room to spread out.

Widely considered to be the world's first modern skyscraper, Chicago’s Home Insurance Building is shown as it was in 1926, just five years before it was demolished.Tribune File Photo

Perhaps no innovation defines Chicago as much as its architecture — chiefly its muscular skyscrapers.

Towering skylines were born and refined here, and they remain the source of innovation still.

Until architect and engineer William Le Baron Jenney’s novel solution to reduce construction materials, cities

could only get as big as they had room to spread out.

With the 1884 advent in Chicago of skeletal construction — in this case, granite piers supporting a web of

internal iron works — buildings, and cities, could grow up.

The first such building was the Home Insurance Building at the corner of Adams and LaSalle streets, rising 10

stories to 138 feet before additions, and supported inside by a matrix of cast and wrought iron. The Ditherington

Flax Mill in England incorporated iron framing but was only five stories high. In Chicago, the plan was to build

tall.

That was the case elsewhere. Leroy Buffington wanted to build a 28-story “stratosphere-scraper” in

Minneapolis in 1888. People mocked him, but by then the idea was set. Every skyscraper after that employed

Jenney’s innovation — until Skidmore, Owings and Merrill used a fireproof all-concrete core to build

Chicago’s Trump Tower, completed in 2008.

Cities would only get taller. The skyscraper had arrived.

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#3: The cell phone (1973)Chances are good there’s a cellular phone or smart phone in your pocket. You may be reading this item on a

smart phone. If so, you have at your fingertips the technological descendent of Chicago inventor Martin Cooper

— Korean War submariner, product of the Illinois Institute of Technology, innovator at Motorola.

And father of the cell phone.

Cooper says he drew his inspiration for the hand-held telephone from an episode of Star Trek when Captain

James T. Kirk whipped open a communicator.

The result was U.S. Patent No. 3,906,166, published Oct. 17, 1973, for a “Radio Telephone System,” which

included both the phone and the tower network to connect it. Cooper shared the patent with seven others.

VIEW PDF OF COOPER'S PATENT

Cooper was born Dec. 26, 1928, and became an electrical engineer with eleven patents in wireless

communications. When he joined Motorola in 1954, it was his second job as a post-Navy civilian. As a senior

development engineer in Motorola’s mobile equipment group, he developed portable handheld police radios and

the like until the early 1970s, when he was head of Motorola’s communications systems division. Then came

Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, the fictitious Kirk, and a piece of “23rd-century” technology within reach of

Motorola’s innovators.

There already were car phones, and telephone companies long had been willing to string in wires to connect

workers in temporary offices. But people move around, even beyond roads, homes and offices. Cooper’s insight

was that phone numbers might be assigned to a person rather than a geographical location. It turned the status

quo on its ear.

You could call anyone, anywhere.

Cooper assembled the team that designed and built the first mobile phone, a process that took just 90 days and

resulted in a 2.5-pound, 10-inch-long ground-breaking monstrosity as ponderous as it was miraculous. Even its

inventors dubbed it “The Brick.”

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When Motorola finally brought it to market in 1983, the company told the public it was the DynaTAC 8000X

(for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage), boasted an enormous battery that could support a 60-minute

phone conversation — and charged folks $3,995 — more than $9,000 when adjusted to 2013 dollars.

The asking price, like that battery, was a big chunk.

Motorola spent $100 million on the project between 1973 and 1993 before ever seeing profits on it, Cooper later

said.

Yet while the analog networks the DynaTAC used became obsolete — as did those big gray bricks — it was the

steadfast efforts of Cooper, his team, and his Chicago-area employers that pioneered the mobile digital lifestyle

most of us now take for granted. To Star Trek viewers of the 1970s, we live in the far future.

Motorola’s Marty Cooper beamed us up.

#4: Open-heart surgery (1893)The first successful open-heart surgery took place on Chicago’s South Side on July 9, 1893. The patient was

James Cornish, a young man with a knife wound to the chest from a barroom brawl. The surgeon, who had gone

into medicine because he disliked earlier work as a shoemaker’s apprentice, was Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.

In 1893, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a pioneering black surgeon, performed the first successful suture of a human heart and pericardium at Provident Hospital in Chicago.Tribune File Photo

The surgery took place in Provident Hospital, the city’s first interracial hospital, which Williams helped to

found. Both patient and surgeon were African-American.

Medical textbooks of the time said that operating on a human heart was too dangerous, and there was no

precedent for opening the chest, longtime Tribune science and medical reporter Ronald Kotulak wrote more

than a century later.

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Despite lacking X-rays, antibiotics, adequate anesthesia or other tools of modern surgery, Williams stepped in.

“With a scalpel, he cut a small hole in Cornish’s chest,” Kotulak wrote, “carefully picking his way past nerves,

muscle, blood vessels and ribs until he reached the rapidly beating heart. Exploring the wound, Williams found

a severed artery. He closed it with sutures, but then discerned an inch-long gash in the pericardium, the tough

sac that surrounds the heart. The heart itself had only been nicked and did not need sutures. But the damaged

sac had to be closed. With Cornish’s heart beating 130 times a minute beneath his nimble fingers, Williams

closed the wound with catgut.”

Cornish lived, and Williams went on to acclaim. In 1894, Williams was appointed chief surgeon at the

Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington D.C., which gave care to formerly enslaved blacks.

As surgery became safer, Chicago emerged as an incubator for surgical innovation. At one point, one in four

American physicians was trained directly or indirectly by Cook County Hospital doctors.

And the tradition of surgical swashbuckling carried on: Many other medical firsts followed.

#5: Balloon frame construction (1833)Chicago, incorporated in 1833 with a population of 350, began innovating as soon as it was born. Poised on the

prairie’s stoop as the West was opening, Chicago created a lasting contribution to the way Americans live by

taking advantage of two demographic and technological trends.

There were 24 states, U.S. population was nearing 13 million, and America was leaning west. The cost of nails

was falling thanks to Jacob Perkins’ nail machine, patented 38 years earlier in Massachusetts and refined by Eli

Whitney and others. The forests had plenty of timber left to cut.

But traditional building methods required hand-hewn beams, hand-wrought mortise and tenon joints, lapped

half dovetails, and something more crucial — labor-intensive construction at a time when labor was spread too

thin.

Then in Chicago, Augustine Taylor got credit for creating balloon-frame construction, a hammer-and-nails

forerunner to the light-frame construction that still dominates U.S. housing.

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In the first half of the 19th century, it was hard to imagine a contribution so life-changing. In retrospect, it’s

impossible not to have seen it coming. America was out-growing its roots, and if they had tried to keep building

as usual, Americans wouldn’t have been able to afford the time or the cost.

Taylor dedicated his work to God, and professional carpenters of the time might have scoffed that the only thing

holding up his buildings was the power of prayer. There were no fancy joints. Just boards and nails.

Experienced builders supposedly derided Taylor’s St. Mary’s Church in Fort Dearborn as “balloon-framed”

because it looked like a stiff breeze would blow it away. But many accounts suggest the name came from a

similar French Missouri type of construction called maison en boulin.

St. Mary's Catholic Church, built in 1833.Photographer unknown/Chicago Historical Society

Whatever the origin of “balloon frame,” while eastern America assembled entire walls on the ground with hand-

hewn joints, lifted into place by a crew of twenty laborers, Taylor and his crew hammered together pre-cut

sawmilled 2x4s and 2x6s.

It was cheaper. It was quicker. And it took only two workers with rudimentary skills.

The wiser carpenters laughed at Chicago’s first offering to architecture. Next door, others were hammering

another building into place.

Chicago architect John M. Van Osdel attributed the invention to Chicago carpenter George W. Snow in 1832.

The Chicago History Museum and other scholars point out that Virginia carpenters in the 17th century — facing

similar pressures to build fast — employed similar techniques. But it wasn’t mass-produced like Chicago was

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prepared to do. Between 1866 and 1875, the Lyman Bridges Company of Chicago sold pre-fab balloon-frame

structures to western settlers, one of several purveyors of so-called “sectionalized housing.”

But the construction style foreshadowed another chapter in Chicago history. In those balloon-framed homes,

studs ran from the foundation to the roof, a long open space that channeled flames up the full length of a wall in

a burning building. Modern wood framing interrupts those lines.

As Chicago elevated the vertical frontier of its first skyline, balloon frames set the stage for the Great Fire of

1871.

#6: Mass-producing the McCormick Reaper (1848)With his invention in 1831, Cyrus McCormick of Virginia reaped increased food production on the U.S. and

manufacturing on Chicago.

The mechanical reaper was the pride of several members of the McCormick family, but Cyrus got it right, filed

the patent, and showed it to the neighbors. When demand among Virginia famers outstripped McCormick’s

ability to build the contraption on the family farm, he turned first to a New York factory and ultimately to

Chicago to mass-produce them.

By 1848, as the prairie was opening, his company was on track to produce 500 reapers for the autumn harvest.

They were built in a factory on the north bank of the Chicago River, and sold with a “full refund guarantee,” an

innovative marketing technique now commonplace.

But it was not how they were sold that made history. It was the problem they solved: The McCormick Reaper

reduced the amount of people it took to work a farm — just in time for the gold discoveries in the American

West and scarcity of labor they produced in the Midwest.

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Early painting of the world's first reaper invented by Cyrus Hall McCormick.Chicago Tribune file photo

The invention and popularity of the design won international awards, ushered in an era of industrialized

agriculture that continues to this day — and set off a losing 1855 patent fight that eventually wrapped in a future

secretary of war (Edwin Stanton, who represented the other side, and won) and left snubbed a future president

(Abraham Lincoln, who as an Illinois lawyer had been involved in the case, only to be big-footed by Stanton.

When elected five years later, Lincoln later hired Stanton, anyway.)

Having lost the patent wars, but still opened the prairie and supplied the prairie farmer, Cyrus McCormick died

in Chicago in 1884, two years before his company’s factories were the site of urban factory strikes that led to

the Haymarket riot.

Through a merger, the legacy of his company — the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company — survived as

International Harvester.

McCormick’s great grand-nephew, Brooks McCormick, served in the 1970s as chief executive of International

Harvester, which became Navistar. The McCormick family’s business and cultural influence, which included

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former Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick — great nephew of Cyrus — continues to span the

Chicago area.

#7: First gay rights group in the US (1924)Henry Gerber, immigrant and World War I Army enlistee, came to Chicago to live near other German-speaking

immigrants. After seeing how people with different sexual orientations were treated here, he championed the

plight of gays in American society.

He immigrated from Germany in 1913. In 1917, he was temporarily committed to a mental institution because

of his sexual orientation, according to the book “Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in

Historical Context,” edited by Vern L. Bullough.

Gerber enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Germany from 1920 to 1923 as a printer and proofreader, and he

worked as a writer and organizer most of his life.

In 1924, having been inspired by the work of German Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian

Committee to overturn anti-homosexual German laws, he founded the Society for Human Rights in Chicago. It

was the first American homosexual rights organization and a precursor to the modern gay-liberation movement.

The group published a newsletter, “Friendship and Freedom,” the country’s first documented gay civil-rights

publication.

"I had always bitterly felt the injustice with which my own American society accused the homosexual of

‘immoral acts,’” Gerber wrote. He filed an application to organize a non-profit in Illinois “to promote and

protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in

the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence.”

Gerber found few allies: Medical and psychological professionals were afraid to ruin their reputations by

involvement, and few gays were willing to join. Before long, the group’s advocacy upset relatives of its thin

membership, at least one of whom had a wife and children. After a series of arrests in the summer of 1925, the

Society for Human Rights disbanded.

Its members, however, informed other gay rights groups around the country, including the Mattachine Society

founded in Los Angeles in 1950. Gerber later moved to New York City and worked on gay rights until his death

in Washington D.C., in 1972.

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He lived long enough to see Illinois in 1962 become the first state to repeal its sodomy laws. In 1992, Gerber

was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. His apartment on North Crilly

Court is a Chicago landmark.

The Society for Human Rights was an American gay rights organization established by Henry Gerber in Chicago in 1924. The Henry Gerber House is located at 1710 North Crilly Court in the Old Town Triangle Chicago Landmark District of Chicago.Keri Wiginton/Chicago Tribune

#8: Reversing the Chicago River (1900)Facing a pending injunction on further work, but having come too far to stop now, a group of dignitaries stood

on the side of a controversial canal bisecting the city of Chicago and watched. A crane clawed off the final

frozen feet between the sewage-distended water pooling below downtown in the Chicago River and the 28-

mile-long Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal leading to the great rivers of the plains.

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The efforts of eight years and 8,500 workers culminated on Jan. 2, 1900, when foul water sluiced through the

crane-carved gap, sliced into the fresh banks and tumbled toward Lockport and the Des Plaines River — west!

— instead of into Lake Michigan as North America’s ancient glaciers had prescribed.

The last two people out of the rapidly filling ditch, just ahead of the turgid waters, were a pair of enterprising

newspaper reporters. They recorded the completion of one of the great engineering feats of the day, involving

new machines and methods for moving earth. The same machines and methods would be used to carve out the

Panama Canal a few years later.

Legalities remained, yes, but the job was done.

The long problem of protecting the city's drinking water had at last been solved. When the gates at Lockport

chugged open months later, the Illinois River swelled with Chicago’s pent-up effluence, and the days of water-

borne disease swept away with the subsiding flood.

The reversal of the Chicago River created its own problems: It flushed big-city waste into prairie rivers and

forever altered local hydrology. But it opened the door to still further advancements. In 1930, the world’s

largest water-reclamation plant was built on the Sanitary and Ship Canal’s banks in Cicero, eventually

processing more than 1.4 billion gallons of daily waste from nearly 3 million people across 260 square miles.

There’s a reason why the American Society of Civil Engineers honored Chicago’s wastewater treatment

designs: From the earliest times until the end of the 19th century, people stewed in the filth of their own

creation. With the advent of wastewater treatment, cities become much more equipped to deal with population

influx — reducing infant mortality and morbidity and improving control and prevention of communicable

diseases.

As the turbid roiling of the reversed Chicago River grew calm and steady, another barrier had been overcome.

Life around water had improved.

#9: Televised political debate (1960)If you listened to it on the radio, said many who did, Nixon won. If you watched it on CBS television, as many

more seemed to do, Kennedy won. Nixon looked terrible.

At CBS Chicago on Sept. 26, 1960, in the old WBBM-TV studios at 630 N. McClurg Ct., about 70 million

viewers watched the first televised Presidential debate, which pitted Richard M. Nixon against John F.

Kennedy, and is credited with erasing Nixon’s lead in the polls.

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Kennedy carried the election — by a whisker.

In the endless political post-mortems that followed — and which still take place in college political science

classes today — a few slipups on Nixon’s part were clear:

Nixon addressed Kennedy; Kennedy addressed the camera. Kennedy appeared poised and relaxed. Nixon

looked sweaty. Some even thought he seemed sick. In 1950, 11 percent of Americans had TVs. In 1960, 88

percent of Americans did. They didn’t just read and listen to the news. They watched it.

Never again would a political candidate ignore the power of television. Increasingly, neither would they ignore

the opportunity to leverage the media to their own advantage.

Politics had entered the age of appearance.

It was not the first time that Chicago made a mark on mass media. In the 1930s, it had been the birthplace of the

radio soap opera, a form of serial broadcast storytelling that endures today in TV programs such as “Breaking

Bad,” “Mad Men,” “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.”

#10: FermiLinux (1998)Since programmer Linus Torvalds created Linux as a free source code in 1991, it has spread around the world

as a useful, flexible operating system that serves as an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows and others.

But if Linux can be thought of as a common “language,” at least one powerful “dialect” originated at Fermilab

near Chicago. In collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, and other labs

and universities, Fermilab recompiled a version of Linux — now called “Scientific Linux” because of its use in

the global scientific community.

In 1997, Fermilab Lead Scientific Linux Developer Connie Sieh tinkered with a version of Linux distributed by

RedHat Inc. — a language attractive because it was free, could be installed in batches and was simple enough

for scientists to install on their own, according to Fermilab’s website.

In 1998, Fermilab renamed it “FermiLinux,” and it became the language used to program physics experiments.

By 2004, developers from Fermilab, CERN and other collaborators had polished it up into “Scientific Linux”

for use in every high-energy physics lab.

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The international language of science used to be Latin.

Now it is “Scientific Linux.”

More than 140,000 users run Scientific Linux, making it easier for scientists to do work while visiting other

institutions. The language is “spoken” at top universities, at national laboratories, at CERN, and on the orbiting

International Space Station.

When scientists experiment with the world’s highest energy physics, they program the experiments in Scientific

Linux. This year, one of those labs — the Large Hadron Collider at CERN — was where scientists from around

the world collaborated to discover the Higgs boson, also referred to as the “God particle.”

Among Chicago’s contributions to the quest: A common way to code that makes cooperation on the universe’s

most vexing mysteries more convenient.

#11: The farm silo (1873)It’s hard to imagine the prairie farmscape without a farmyard, a red barn — and a tower silo. But until 1873,

grain wasn’t stored in silos; it was stored in pits.

After Fred Hatch graduated from what is now the University of Illinois, he and father Lewis Hatch built the first

tower silo on their farm near Spring Grove, Ill.

At what was then the “Illinois Industrial University,” agriculture textbooks were scarce, and some had to be

translated from French and German by Professor Willard H. Bliss.

According to European pamphlets of the time, silage production involved burying entire corn plants in pits. The

idea strikes us now — as it did Fred Hatch then — as backward.

Fred Hatch took the established idea (putting corn in a hole) and added to it (extending the hole above ground).

The Hatches lined a 6-foot pit with rocks and mortar and kept building higher — extending the walls 16 feet

high inside their family barn. They built the floor of the new structure out of double-ply floorboard lined with

tar paper.

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The design reduced rain spoilage, made it faster to fill, pack and empty, and set the stage for another

agricultural innovation — putting a separate roof on the silo, and building it outside.

#12: The Ferris Wheel (1893)More than a diversion, more than the first amusement park ride, the giant wheel imagined and built by George

Washington Gale Ferris Jr. for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago “involved the services and

the products of many different branches of art and industry,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

The first Ferris Wheel was built by George W. Ferris for the Columbian Exposition. It stood 264 feet high and had 36 cars that could each carry 40 people.Chicago Tribune archive photo

“Distinguished men named it the proudest achievement of modern engineering,” the Tribune reported that

summer.

Conceived for entertainment, Ferris solved a deeper problem of the time: how to build lighter bridge spans.

Ferris was a graduate of New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and worked as a bridge-builder in

Pittsburgh. He foresaw the growing need for structural steel.

The Ferris wheel delivered in every respect. Its 45-foot axle was at the time the world’s largest hollow forging.

Its height, 264 feet, was designed to rival the 1,063-foot Eiffel Tower of the 1889 Paris Exposition. (Chicago

always appreciated a good rivalry.) While nowhere near as tall, it was every bit the centerpiece of the fair. Just

building it strained the engineering of the day.

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It fulfilled its promise to thrill before it was even built.

In April of 1893, the Tribune sent a reporter to watch the wheel’s construction. Just getting to the site — the

South Side’s Midway Plaisance — was an adventure; fair construction was notoriously behind schedule. When

the reporter got to the wheel, he found a crowd:

“Work was in progress on the tremendous iron framework of the Ferris wheel ... People stood around it in a

solid mass and gazed skyward till their necks ached and their supply of Ahs and Ohs gave out. There never was

a minute when less than 500 people were massed around the base of the great mass of ironwork. The chorus of

exclamations reminded one of a display of fireworks in the parks.”

At the time, the only things as tall as the Ferris wheel were church steeples, the far-off skyscrapers of the

growing Chicago skyline, and the hot air balloon that rose and fell on its tether at the fairground. Everyone who

rode the wheel, about 38,000 people a day, remarked on it.

“Eighteen months ago George Ferris had a wheel in his head,” the Tribune marveled on June 22, 1893.

“Yesterday it reared itself 300 feet into the air on slender shafts of steel and distinguished men named it the

proudest achievement of modern engineering. Then it revolved and 1,000 people rose and fell with its majestic

sweep while the earth and the wonders thereof were gradually unrolled at their feet. Meanwhile at its base sat

the inventor, a modest young man in a gray suit with a drooping mustache covering his determined mouth.”

Ferris’ legacy endures in the 150-foot-tall Ferris wheel that serves as the symbol of Chicago’s Navy Pier.

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#13: Deep dish pizza (1943)Among America’s eateries, Chicago cuisine is notable for its take on pizza: Thick as a stone slab, saucy and

larger than life.

Chicago’s famous deep-dish pizza, pictured here, was invented in 1943.Bob Fila/Chicago Tribune

The families behind Chicago’s most famous pizza houses each lay claim to inventing the recipe, but one thing

about the origins of Deep Dish Pizza is known pretty certainly:

It came to be in 1943 inside the kitchen of a converted 19th Century mansion built with the Mears family’s

lumber money at 29 E. Ohio St. — today the site of Pizzeria Uno.

There were no written records. No recipes. No vintage photos.

But Chicago had produced a unique and enduring variation on traditional Italian and American pizzas. It had a

coarse, crunchy crust and sauce on top of cheese. It was heavy on Italian sausage.

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Nationally, pizza is a $30 billion industry, and is especially popular among Chicagoans. Pizzeria Uno and its

sibling a block away, Pizzeria Due, now are part of a national chain, Uno, which boasts on its website that “Ike

Sewell developed deep dish pizza and opened a new type of restaurant at the corner of Ohio & Wabash.”

Nathan Mears’ old house would become Chicago legend — a pizzeria founded by Richard Novaretti, known as

Ric Riccardo, the owner of Riccardo’s Restaurant, and his friend, Sewell, a Chicago liquor distributor. In their

restaurant worked Rudy Malnati Sr., father of Lou Malnati and grandfather of the current owners of the Lou

Malnati’s restaurant chain.

Riccardo and Sewell’s restaurant opened in 1943 as The Pizzeria, became Pizzeria Riccardo soon afterward and

settled in as Pizzeria Uno in 1955, when the partners opened Pizzeria Due in Mears’s daughter’s mansion across

the street at Wabash and Ontario.

The personalities they gathered in that Ohio Street kitchen make it difficult, despite Uno’s website

proclamation, to know exactly who came up with the recipes. Each person, and their families, stakes a claim to

the One True Recipe. They became the founders of Malnati’s and Pizano’s, Gino’s East, and Uno itself.

But Chicago benefitted from the rivalry — and so do visitors, or anyone who hungers for Chicago’s heavy-

weight pies and can find them on the road.

#14: Consumer preference research (1928)

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Before he was assistant secretary of state at the close of World War II, before he published the Encyclopaedia

Britannica, before he was appointed to the U.S. Senate — and before he introduced a resolution to expel Joseph

McCarthy from the Senate — William Burnett Benton was a humble Yale graduate from Minnesota who

introduced consumer preference research, and so revolutionized how consumer products are positioned.

Former U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, former Connecticut Sen. William Benton, presenting Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir with an illustrated Passover Hagada at Meir’s office in Jerusalem.Government Press Office

It was 1928. Benton was working at Chicago’s Lord & Thomas advertising agency when owner Albert Lasker

told him to land Colgate-Palmolive by impressing the outsized toiletry powerhouse with market research.

Benton worked night and day for two months to record housewives’ preferences for the products of each

company.

The firm used the pioneering survey in its initial Colgate-Palmolive campaign and landed the account before the

survey was completed.

And soon Benton formed a useful partnership — Benton & Bowles — with Chester Bowles. They moved to

New York the next year despite having only one client: General Foods.

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It’s hard to imagine a more productive public life.

Between 1945 and 1963, Benton helped found the United Nations, served as assistant secretary of state, was

appointed to the U.S. Senate (luckily, Bowles had been elected governor of Connecticut), and had that scrap

with McCarthy, who at one point called Benton a “mental midget.”

He won reelection by defeating Prescott Sheldon Bush, father of one U.S. President, George Herbert Walker

Bush, and grandfather of another, George W. Bush. He held a steady job at Britannica and, in 1963, was

appointed U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO in Paris.

Incidentally, the first ad agency to establish a market research department was J. Walter Thompson of Chicago

and New York, according to “Robertson’s Book of Firsts: Who Did What for the First Time.”

The staggering implications — you would know exactly which audience would prefer which magazine! — were

coupled later with Benton’s work — you would know exactly which product attributes people would want!

Sociologist Gordon Hancock hated the idea. It was tantamount to cheating.

In a statement that must have brought grins to the faces of that up-and-coming generation of ad men, Hancock

decried in 1926: “Excessive scientific advertising takes undue advantage of the public.”

This was, of course, the point.

And still is.

#15: The mechanical dishwasher (1886)

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The mechanical dishwasher as a practical device emerged not from convenience but from annoyance, when a

wealthy woman in downstate Shelbyville got tired of servants breaking her dishes after fancy dinner parties.

The stories about Josephine Cochran — she later added an “e” and became “Cochrane” — have the prairie

patrician storming out to the woodshed to build the machine forthwith. Actually, she started doing the dishes

herself, and probably for many years. But she wanted a machine that could do the job faster, without the risk of

chipped china, and the yearning haunted her.

J. G. Cochran's Dish Washing Machine patentUnited States Patent and Trademark Office

]

Joel Houghton had an 1850 patent for a device made of wood and cranked by hand, but it was neither practical

nor widely adopted. Cochrane knew of no such patent. “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing

machine,” several accounts have the Shelbyville socialite saying, “I’ll do it myself.”

And she did. It was 1886.

Cochrane measured her dishes, built wire compartments, and placed them inside a wheel inside a copper boiler.

It worked. Cochrane received patent No. 355,139 for the first dishwashing machine just after Christmas in 1886.

Cochrane was the granddaughter of steamboat inventor John Fitch and the widow of a successful grocer and

court clerk named William Cochran. Their friends asked for and received their own models of Cochrane’s

contraption. Restaurants and hotels eventually called her with requests. Though Cochrane got credit for the

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invention, a local Illinois Central Railroad mechanic named George Butters helped build it in a shed on her

property.

Her invention extends to the modern market. Cochrane showed the dishwasher at the 1893 World’s Columbian

Exposition and later started a company to build the machines. After her death, Hobart Manufacturing bought out

the company, and later released the dishwashers under the KitchenAid brand — now owned by Whirlpool.

#16: Pullman sleeper car (1864)George Pullman was one of Chicago’s greatest industrialists, remembered for his luxurious rail cars and

opportunistic — often demeaning — labor practices toward blacks.

The onetime Colorado gold broker developed the “palace car” sleeper in 1864, which brought luxury to the

middle class, his black workers into the middle class and President Abraham Lincoln home from Washington

D.C. to his final rest in Springfield.

The innovation was more than technical. With the Pullman car came the notion that luxury was more than a

thing — it was a service.

So luxury aboard a Pullman sleeper car became synonymous also with service from Pullman porters. All were

black.

Pullman had used his $100,000 investment in the “palace car” to gain a unique niche in the railroad-sleeping-car

industry, by seizing on service as a critical complement to luxurious accommodations. Railroads effectively

outsourced their luxury appointments to Pullman, his sleeper cars and his crew.

This was the late 1860s, when an enormous pool of skilled labor arrived on the market: the former house slaves

of the Deep South. The Pullman cars were a leg up, but also demeaning, and a rolling sweatshop.

In his review of Larry Tye’s book about the porters — “Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making

of the Black Middle Class” — University of Illinois at Chicago history professor Leon Fink noted that “Pullman

porters, of necessity, were accomplished actors.”

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“Working for the largest employer of African-Americans in the United States for nearly a century, they put on

— for their employer, for the passengers they served, and (out of a different but no-less-pressing logic) for

themselves and their families — one of the best traveling shows in American history,” Fink wrote for the

Tribune in 2004.

Passengers crossed the United States in luxury, paying many times the price of a railroad ticket to sleep

overnight and dine in cars served by Pullman porters. In turn, Pullman porters travelled the country as well.

They brought with them copies of the pro-equality Chicago Defender newspaper, which played a role in

influencing the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North — especially

Chicago. The porters also bought phonograph records in cities and resold them in towns, spreading the

popularity of jazz and blues artists nationwide.

Yet the porters endured undignified work requirements and grueling hours. And, when conditions didn’t

improve, the porters unionized.

If you’re an African-American living outside the South, any jazz-loving American outside the river cities that

incubated jazz music — or anyone without blue blood who indulges in an everyday luxury — you’re following

a path blazed by those porters, put to work by George Pullman.

#17: The softball game (1887)Indoor baseball, mush ball, playground, “softbund ball,” kitten ball. Among Chicago’s many contributions to

sports — and to company picnics and America culture — was softball.

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This is believed to be the first photo of a softball team, also called indoor baseball, in 1897. (Historical photo from the Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)X.O. Howe/Library of Congress

The sport was first played indoors, in 1887 at Chicago’s Farragut Boat Club, and it got the name “softball” in

1926. Interest exploded in 1933 after a tournament at Chicago’s “A Century of Progress” world’s fair.

The first softball was a boxing glove tied up in its laces, the bat a stick.

The inventers were bored Ivy Leaguers.

Harvard and Yale alumni at the Farragut Boat Club gym created the game on Thanksgiving Day while waiting

for the results of the annual Harvard-Yale football game. An enthusiastic Yalie tossed the boxing glove at a

Harvard alum, who swatted it away with a stick. On the right kind of afternoon, that qualifies as inspiration.

George Hancock, a reporter for the Chicago Board of Trade, got credit for the idea.

The football score: Yale, 17, Harvard, 8. In Chicago, the softball score was 41-40, and it’s unclear who beat

whom.

In 1996, women’s fast-pitch softball briefly became an Olympic sport, though it was dropped from the 2012

games. Nowadays, the Amateur Softball Association claims more than 40 million people play the sport each

summer, making it the top team participant sport in the United States.

Along the way, two separate species of the sport evolved.

The size of the ball changed often until the 20th century. Much of the world adopted the 12-inch game, which

requires gloves and a field.

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Chicago, not done innovating, stayed with a 16-inch ball — so you could play without gloves, on smaller fields,

or inside during abysmal weather.

What’s more correct? Ask a Chicagoan.

While you’re at it, visit the Chicago 16-inch Softball Hall of Fame at 16inchsoftballhof.com.

#18: The Zipper (1893)A Massachusetts man wasn’t interested in further notoriety, and the Swedish immigrant who picked up the idea

in Pennsylvania may have made it better. But Chicago never was shy about exhibitions, or taking credit.

Chicago’s innovation: Holding the world together.

W. L. Judson's Clasp Locker or Unlocker for ShoesUnited States Patent and Trademark Office

Behold: It was here, in 1893, that inventor Whitcomb L. Judson, the onetime peripatetic purveyor of band cutters and grain scales, revealed his patented “clasp locker” to the public at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. You’re probably wearing its intellectual-property progeny even now: Judson had created the proto-Zipper.

By then, Judson held 14 patents, all for items in pneumatic streetcars, and none of them successful, before he

finally pulled it together with his clasp locker.

Fashion always had a hand on the zipper. While working on pneumatic streetcars at Earle Manufacturing

Company, the mechanical engineer also found it tedious to fasten the high-button boots en vogue at the time.

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His solution was a complicated hook-and-eye fastener that featured a “guide” to clasp a sequence of hooks and

eyes to close and reopen a clothing item. It took him two years to convince the U.S. Patent Office it was new.

Once he did, he unveiled it swiftly at the World’s Fair.

It was originally designed for shoes, but Judson imagined wider horizons: It might be useful on gloves, he

reasoned on his patent application. Perhaps mail bags. Or corsets.

The crowd at the Columbian Exposition swooned — over the Ferris Wheel. Judson’s “chain-lock” fastener kept

popping open.

Undeterred, Judson, his manufacturing boss Harry Earle and partner Lewis Walker launched the Universal

Fastener Company, which relocated to Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It was in Pennsylvania that

Swedish-American Otto Fredrik Gideon Sundback improved on Judson’s “C-curity Fastener” by adding to the

number of teeth per inch. Ten was enough to make the invention stick. By 1914, Sundback had it.

The design may have been more popular, but the name lacked zip: Sundback’s 1914 innovation was called …

the “Hookless No. 2.”

The name said it: No hook.

B.F. Goodrich popularized the name “Zipper” for the sound it made when the company put the invention on its

rubber boots in the 1920s. It is said that Esquire magazine put the zipper in every other intimate place. In 1937,

the magazine hosted a “Battle of the Fly” contest pitting the zipper against the button fly, according to the

Encyclopedia of Modern Everyday Inventions. Game, set, match, Sundback’s secure zipper. It helped avoid

“the possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray,” the magazine concluded.

Judson was long gone before Sundback improved on his design. But at last, the descendant of Chicago’s “chain-

lock” held fast.

#19: Mail-order retail (1872)He'd manned a barrel-factory cutting machine, stacked bricks in kilns, fitted shoes, managed a pair of country

stores and then hustled lamps and dry-goods as a traveling salesman. But it was his abiding sense that farmers

were cheated by backcountry merchants that sparked the idea for which Chicago remembers his name.

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His name was Aaron Montgomery Ward, and his idea was mail-order retail.

“The Spirit of Progress” is silhouetted Sunday, September 30, 2012 against the second night of a “Harvest Moon.” The sculpture was placed in 1929 atop an administration building for Montgomery Ward, now One River Place, a condominium development at Chicago Avenue and Larrabee Street.Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune

Store owners held local monopolies, and middlemen who hauled manufactured products to the countryside ran

up prices. Ward’s plan was to buy up big-city inventory with cash, cut selling costs by eliminating retail

overhead — and deliver dry goods to townsfolk at the nearest railroad station. It was a preposterously disruptive

idea, the Amazon.com of its day.

Early investors balked, and it’s hard to imagine how Ward and two fellow employees scrounged the $1,600 in

capital it took to amass start-up inventory — or why they tried again after their first lot incinerated in the Great

Chicago Fire. But together they rented a shipping room on North Clark Street and set out to describe a

comprehensive offering of 163 products in their first mail-order catalog.

In 1872, they got started. In 1873, he bought out the partners. By other accounts, they quit.

The next year, the customers came.

City orders were expensive and difficult at first. Farmers were Ward’s primary market.

The most popular item in a catalog filled with pumps and feed cutters, threshers and engines … was the sewing

machine. As sales increased, so did Ward’s buying power, and so did the company’s offerings. Others, notably

Sears, followed suit. By 1888, annual sales topped $1 million.

Ideas sell, but they rarely last.

When Ward’s closed its catalog business in 1985, it measured sales in the billions but still posted an annual

loss. Contributing were the costs of printing and delivering a general-merchandise catalog for customers

interested in niche merchandise.

The world needed another innovation: Targeted catalogs.

Or the Internet. Wards.com still lives.

#20: The vacuum cleaner (1868)The march of the vacuum cleaner, and its future, was predicated on the questions all new ventures and new

products seek to address: How bad is the customer’s pain? And how much does this new product relieve that

pain?

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Before 1868, before Chicago — before Ives W. McGaffey — “cleaning up” meant sweeping up. The most

technological cleaners of the time were carpet sweepers. Before those, brooms.

Hiram H. Herrick of Boston submitted a patent for a carpet sweeper in 1858, but it wasn’t terribly efficient and

didn’t catch on.

Ives W. McGaffey's Sweeping-Machine patent. United States Patent and Trademark Office

Daniel Hess, an Iowa man, turned in a patent in 1860 for a device with a rolling brush and an elaborate bellows

that generated suction.

McGaffey took further the technology of the time, creating in 1868 something relatively light and compact, but

with a tricky hand crank and an eyebrow-raising $25 price tag (who could afford such convenience?). With the

help of the American Carpet Cleaning Co. of Boston, McGaffey sold models in Chicago and Boston. It is

thought most were lost in the Chicago Fire of 1871. Two McGaffey vacuums remain.

But innovation had marched on.

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John S. Thurman of St. Louis introduced a gasoline-powered carpet cleaner in 1899 and, across the Atlantic

England’s Hubert Cecil Booth in 1901 introduced his “Puffing Billy.” It improved upon Yankee inventors’

ideas, refining them over the decades.

One thing true of the vacuum cleaner — as with any consumer product aimed at a common human need — is

that a lot of people will try to build one better. And what could be more common than the desire to tidy up a bit?

It’s a giant market.

Consumers have seen the upside. All that competition drives technological innovation, and that drives down

cost.

Until the next breakthrough.

– [email protected]