Top Things Invented in Missouri

The 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis is where the ice cream cone got its national debut, popularized when a waffle vendor next to an ice cream stand rolled his waffles into a cone to help the ice cream seller who had run out of dishes.

That same fair is widely credited with popularizing iced tea in America, after a tea vendor started pouring his hot tea over ice during a St. Louis summer that made hot tea a hard sell. Both claims get disputed by historians in other cities, but St. Louis has the strongest documented case for both, and the 1904 fair remains one of the most consequential events in American food history.

"The greatest thing since sliced bread" traces back to Chillicothe, Missouri, where the Chillicothe Baking Company sold the first machine-sliced loaves on July 7, 1928, using a slicer built by inventor Otto Rohwedder. Sales at the bakery reportedly jumped 2,000 percent within two weeks, and the phrase stuck around a lot longer than the machine did.

St. Louis has fed the rest of the country plenty, too: toasted ravioli, a fried, breaded take on the Italian dish, was reportedly invented in the Hill neighborhood by accident when a cook dropped ravioli into hot oil instead of boiling water, and gooey butter cake has a similar origin story — a Depression-era baker who mixed up his butter-to-flour ratio decided to sell the sticky, flattened result rather than toss it, and the city has been eating it ever since.

Springfield has its own claims. Cashew chicken was invented there in 1963 by David Leong, a Chinese restaurant owner looking for a dish that would appeal to the Midwestern palate, and it's now a regional signature dish found almost nowhere outside the Ozarks. Springfield is also the official birthplace of Route 66: businessman John T. Woodruff and Oklahoma highway chairman Cyrus Avery settled on the name in a 1926 telegram sent from the city's Colonial Hotel.

Some of Missouri's inventions are things you've probably sat in or driven on without knowing it. Charles and Ray Eames designed the Eames Lounge Chair in St. Louis in 1956, still one of the most recognized pieces of furniture in the world and a fixture in MoMA's permanent collection. Henry Timken, working out of Sedalia, patented the tapered roller bearing in 1898, an invention so foundational to how wheels and axles handle load that his company was making 90 percent of the bearings in the United States by 1920.

St. Louis has exported some outsized characters, too. Bob Chandler built Bigfoot, the original monster truck, out of a four-wheel-drive shop in Hazelwood, turning a modified Ford pickup into the vehicle that launched an entire motorsport when it performed the first car-crushing stunt in 1981. Energizer, also headquartered in St. Louis, created the Energizer Bunny in 1989, and the character became one of the most recognizable advertising icons in American history, still running (and banging the drums) decades later.

Some of Missouri's biggest technology exports came from people who left. Jack Kilby, born in Jefferson City, invented the integrated circuit — the microchip — while working at Texas Instruments, a breakthrough that later won him the Nobel Prize in Physics. Lloyd Espenschied, born in St. Louis, co-invented the modern coaxial cable at Bell Labs in the 1920s, the technology that eventually made television transmission and cable TV possible. James Fergason, from Carrollton, developed liquid crystal display technology in 1958, the basis for the flat-panel screens now in nearly everything with a display. Bill Lear, born in Hannibal, designed the Learjet, the business jet that made his name synonymous with private aviation.

Monsanto, which ran its agricultural biotech empire out of St. Louis for over a century before Bayer's 2018 acquisition, developed Roundup and pioneered genetically modified crop technology that reshaped how much of the world's food supply is grown. Cerner, out of Kansas City, helped build the modern electronic health record system starting in 1979, changing how medicine is documented and practiced in hospitals nationwide.

Columbia's contribution is more recent, and stranger: 3D bioprinting has real roots at Mizzou. Gabor Forgacs, a University of Missouri biophysics professor, filed the founding patents for a scaffold-free bioprinting process in 2004, which became the basis for Organovo, the company that built the first commercial 3D bioprinter and is still developing lab-grown human tissue for drug testing today. A few miles away, the University of Missouri Research Reactor is the only facility in the country producing several of the radioisotopes used in cancer treatment, including lutetium-177, the active ingredient in FDA-approved therapies for prostate cancer and neuroendocrine tumors. MURR alone supplies doses used to treat roughly half a million cancer patients a year.

Missouri's inventions tend to share a quality: most of them became so embedded in daily life, food, or infrastructure that people stopped associating them with where they came from at all.

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