Minnesotans are proud of their heritage, including the “firsts” we’re known for, such as Scotch tape, water skis, Spam and the pacemaker. While other states are equally proud of their firsts—New York for the credit card; Michigan, the artificial heart; Texas, the integrated circuit—few other states, if any, have created as many firsts with as wide-ranging effect as has Minnesota. We officially rank between second (so says the Harvard Business Review) and ninth (Forbes and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) among “most innovative states.” Such distinctions tend to look only at volume and not overall significance, however. With this in mind, TCB editors combed through more than 100 inventions and “firsts” to present in the following pages 50 Minnesota firsts that have had the greatest impact on society.

The company originally known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing moved away from mining (and the North Shore), and has been developing new products ever since. One of 3M’s earliest innovations, masking tape, was originally created for use by auto painters for two-tone paint jobs. The tape’s inventor, Richard Drew, would go on to develop the first transparent cellophane adhesive tape, which 3M branded as Scotch tape.

Frank C. Mars, a native of Hancock, Minn., founded the Mar-O-Bar candy company in Minneapolis in 1920. Three years later, Mars introduced Milky Way, reputedly the world’s first “filled” candy bar. Its filling was inspired by the name of a chocolate-malt milkshake popular at the time. Milky Way was a hit, and six years after its introduction, Mars moved his company to the Midwest candy capital, Chicago. There the company would create other famous brands, notably 3 Musketeers and M&Ms.

On a summer day on Lake Pepin, 18-year-old Ralph Samuelson affixed two 8-foot-long pine boards to his feet, then grabbed hold of a rope connected to a powerboat. Over time, as he mastered his invention, Samuelson also ski-jumped (on a greased platform) and speed-skied (going 80 miles per hour behind a flying boat). Samuelson’s renown was not enough to prevent another person from patenting water skis, but history has confirmed him as the father of the invention. Despite the daredevilry of his youth, Samuelson ended his days quietly, as a turkey farmer in Pine Island.

The first electric toaster was invented in Scotland in 1893, but it took Stillwater mechanic Charles Strite to make that breakthrough a little more convenient. Though Strite patented the idea, other companies actually built the device, with the first—Minneapolis-based Waters Genter’s 1-A-1 Toastmaster—reaching the market in 1925. The Toastmaster brand is still around, attached not only to toasters but also to coffeemakers and a variety of commercial food preparation equipment.

Carl Wickman and Andrew Anderson open the first bus line in order to transport iron miners between Hibbing and Alice (a nearby town that Hibbing later annexed). That became the start of America’s largest cross-country bus company. Greyhound hasn’t stopped in Hibbing, or anywhere else on the Iron Range, however, since 1973.

The BBB grew out of the “vigilance committees” established regionally by the advertising industry to ensure that advertisements’ claims were true. The Minneapolis Advertising Club’s vigilance committee was the first to call itself the Better Business Bureau, and it established the mode of operation followed by the 110-plus BBBs now established in the U.S. and Canada. Businesses that affiliate with their local BBB are required to follow standards for honesty and fair dealing. In the past few years, alas, various BBBs have been accused of protecting or punishing certain member companies, and several chapters have been disaffiliated.

Walter Deubener owned St. Paul’s first cash-and-carry grocery store (until then, all grocers delivered). To make it easier for his customers to tote their own purchases, he created a bag with a loop of string supporting the bottom that formed convenient handles at the top. It was such a notable innovation that the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce still names its annual business awards after Deubener. Given how long Deubener’s invention has been around, it’s surprising that there still are supermarkets that make you clutch your groceries in your arms.

Train storage structures built of wood had an unfortunate habit of burning down, so grain trader Frank Peavey drove the development of something a little less flammable. Working with Charles Haglin, a Minneapolis contractor who also built Minneapolis City Hall and the Grain Exchange Building (among many other structures), Peavey built the first concrete grain elevator. It’s still standing near the interchange of Highways 7 and 100 in St. Louis Park, though it hasn’t held grain for more than a century. It now advertises the location of cooking utensil product manufacturer Nordic Ware.

Swiss-born Albert Butz invented a “damper flapper” that allowed a coal-fired furnace to be regulated via the world’s first furnace thermostat. The St. Paul business he founded to manufacture the product, the Butz Thermo-electric Regulator Co., would evolve into today’s Honeywell International. Honeywell became one of Minnesota’s most legendary and innovative companies, thanks to the high-design round thermostats it began to market in 1952. Honeywell still makes round thermostats and numerous other products, but it’s based in New Jersey these days.

James J. Hill turned St. Paul into the Upper Midwest’s rail hub by building the northernmost transcontinental railroad route in the United States, from Minnesota to Puget Sound. What’s more, it was the only completed transcontinental that was financed completely from private funds, thanks largely to the land it acquired in North Dakota and Montana—land it sold mostly to immigrant farmers. Hill’s Great Northern survives as part of BNSF, one of the seven remaining Class I railroads still operating in the U.S.

St. Louis Park-based Nordic Ware produced the perfect postwar cooking utensil, one that allows even indifferent bakers to whip up an elegant dessert with ease. It was a slow seller until the 1960s, when a Pillsbury Bake-Off contestant used the pan to create a winning recipe. Nordic Ware is now a widely diversified cookware company, but it continues to create new Bundt pan designs. And it still makes them in Minnesota.

Now a common anti-inflammatory used to treat maladies ranging from eczema to chronic joint pain, cortisone is a steroid hormone secreted by the adrenal gland in times of stress. Mayo Clinic researchers Edward Kendall, Philip Hench and Harold Mason identified cortisone and discovered its ability to suppress the immune system. Merck & Co. would introduce the first commercially produced cortisone in 1949. Cortisone may well have played a key role in subsequent U.S. history: If it hadn’t been for Kendall and Hench’s discovery, John F. Kennedy—who took cortisone both orally and via injection—might not have become president.

General Mills didn’t invent the packaged cake mix—such products had been around since the 1920s. But until the Minneapolis company mastered the food chemistry, cake mixes were readily subject to spoilage. When General Mills introduced Betty Crocker ginger cake mix in 1947, just-add-water products became much more shelf-stable—and widely accepted among harried parents of baby boomers.

The founders of Mound Metalcraft Co. originally manufactured steel garden implements. Then a toymaker operating in the same building gave them his patents, and the toy steam shovels and cranes that started as a sideline for Mound Metalcraft quickly became its business. Bigger and more rugged than other toy vehicles, Tonka trucks were postwar playtime classics. The company would disappear in 1991 after some diversification failures, but the brand lives on — though in plastic, not steel.

Magnetic recording had been around for years; 3M made it useful. Until then, magnetic recording used unwieldy and limited media such as wire and steel tape. 3M developed a strong but flexible plastic tape material as a recording medium. Singer Bing Crosby used 3M tape to record his radio show in 1948, and the invention became the basis of the commercial and consumer tape-recording businesses. In 1996, 3M’s tape business became part of spinoff company Imation, which still produces magnetic tape.

Minnesota’s reputation as health care innovator isn’t restricted to physical health. Developed under the auspices of the University of Minnesota, the MMPI is the world’s most widely used standardized personality and psychology test. It’s used to not only to help psychologists make diagnoses, but also to aid employers in screening job candidates. Using a set of 567 true/false questions (there’s also a shorter, streamlined version), the test is “graded” using numerous scales to assess anxiety levels, propensity for addiction, tendency toward extroversion or introversion, and many other psychological characteristics. The MMPI has its critics, but it’s still considered the gold standard of personality assessments.

Like many innovative U.S. companies, Honeywell was involved in defense work during World War II. What was then Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. developed an electronic autopilot for U.S. Air Force bombers, helping pilots fly steadily enough to hit targets from high altitudes. In time, aerospace would become one of Honeywell’s largest businesses.

Minnesota-born Alfred Nier was one of the state’s most remarkable scientists, but his achievements aren’t well-known here, perhaps because he was a physicist rather than a physician or otherwise involved in medicine. But Nier’s work in mass spectrography at the University of Minnesota was crucial in the development of a pure sample of uranium-235, the isotope that would be a key component of the atomic bomb. Among the other milestones in Nier’s career was the development of small mass spectrometers used on the Viking Mars landers in the 1970s to identify elements in the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

Leave it to a couple of Minnesota inventors to develop a cooling technology. Joseph Numero, a manufacturer of sound equipment for movie theaters, and Frederick Jones, an inventor who worked for Numero, designed a mechanical refrigeration unit to replace the ice blocks that trucking companies used to cool their trailers. Numero sold his sound-equipment business and together with Jones, founded the company now known as Thermo King. (During World War II, Jones would design portable cooling units for the military to keep food and medicine from spoiling.) Thermo King was acquired by Ingersoll Rand in 1997, but its headquarters remains in Minnesota.

Northwest Airways was the first U.S. airline to offer a closed-cabin aircraft, a three-passenger Stinson Detroiter. Northwest, which was founded that same year, had its headquarters in Detroit at the time. But it flew only between the Twin Cities and Chicago at first, primarily as an air-mail carrier. In 1929, a group of Twin Cities businesspeople acquired Northwest and moved its headquarters to Minnesota, operating out of St. Paul’s Holman Field. Delta Air Lines acquired Northwest in 2008.



No.21 1951

Snow Blower Toro introduced the first walk-behind snow blower, much to the relief of corner-lot homeowners and their cardiologists. Numerous companies manufacture blowers these days; Toro’s current line ranges from a compact electric model to a massive heavy-duty model with a 342cc engine that can blast the white stuff up to 45 feet.

No.22 1952

Open-Heart Surgery A professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota in the 1950s and ’60s who later became director of medical affairs at St. Jude Medical, C. Walton Lillehei is one of the world’s greatest heart physicians. One of his first great accomplishments: the first successful open-heart surgery, on a 5-year-old girl at the University of Minnesota, which Lillehei performed with colleague F. John Lewis.

No.23 1953

Black-Box Flight Data Recorder Though now firmly focused on food, General Mills made many intriguing excursions into other industries during the postwar decades. For many years, it had a mechanical division that developed a variety of devices. One was the “black box” to record flight data on airplanes—crucial for determining the causes of a crash. The man behind the device was collision researcher James “Crash” Ryan in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Engineering, who worked with General Mills to perfect the technology. It took years of lobbying to get airlines on board, but now no commercial airplane takes off without it.

No.24 1955

Blood Pump Another first associated with pioneering open-heart surgeon Walt Lillehei: the helix reservoir bubble oxygenator, which Lillehei developed with colleague Richard A. Wall. The device kept oxygen pumped into the blood during heart surgery. Before that, the standard approach to oxygenating the patient’s blood was cross circulation, which linked the patient’s bloodstream to that of a healthy donor.



No.25 1955

In-the-ear Hearing Aid World War II Air Force hero Ken Dahlberg left hearing-aid manufacturer Telex in 1948 to start an electronics company manufacturing “pillow radios” for hotels and hospitals. Within a few years, Dahlberg was making hearing aids of his own, incorporating a new technology: transistors. In 1955, his company created an all-transistor model called the Magic-Ear, whose components were contained in a small “shell” that fit inside the ear. It was the first in-the-ear aid, and it made wearing a hearing aid much less of a burden. Dahlberg’s company is now called Miracle-Ear, and remains based in Minnesota, though it’s now owned by an Italian hearing-aid company, Amplifon.



No.26 1955

Taconite Pellets The Minnesota Iron Range might have lost its major industry instead of remaining one of the world’s largest sources of iron if it weren’t for the work of Edward Davis. Knowing that there were limited quantities of “natural” ore in the ground, Davis worked for decades to perfect technologies that would allow mining companies to separate iron from taconite, a rock formation with less pure iron content, and turn that iron into pellets for use by steel-making blast furnaces. When the natural ore began to run out in the 1950s, taconite-pellet technology was ready to take over. In 1955, Reserve Mining in Silver Bay produced the first pellets. There’s still plenty of taconite on the Range, though demand for iron has slumped in the past year, thanks to a global glut of steel.



No.27 1955

Climate-Controlled Shopping Center The Dayton department store company and Austrian-born designer Victor Gruen (a socialist in his younger days) changed the retail game forever when Southdale opened in Edina. Gruen had originally envisioned something more like a mixed-use downtown, and came to loathe the malls that Southdale pioneered and have since spread worldwide. It’s probably no coincidence that one of the world’s largest enclosed centers is just a few miles away from the original. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society Southdale Mall in 1956



No.28 1956

Recreational Snowmobile Edgar Hetteen didn’t invent the snowmobile. But the northern Minnesota native saw that snowmobiles had serious potential for recreational purposes, and he built the first such machine at his Roseau farm-implement company, Polaris Industries. The machine took off, and Hetteen would take off from Polaris in 1960 to start another snowmobile maker in Thief River Falls, a company that would come to be known as Arctic Cat. Polaris and Arctic Cat remain major Minnesota manufacturers, and both still make snowmobiles, although the product that has driven their growth in recent years is the all-terrain vehicle.



No.29 1957

Implantable Pacemaker Working in his garage, electrical engineer Earl Bakken developed a battery-powered heart pacemaker that can be worn inside the body. Previously, pacemakers were large machines that had to be carted next to the patient. With his device, Bakken launched Medtronic, now a global med-tech giant. And yes, groundbreaking heart surgeon C. Walton Lillehei was associated with this breakthrough as well: He asked Bakken to create such a device after one of his heart patients died.