Many of the University’s faculty and alumni have created innovations that advance people’s daily lives.

From instant spray whipped cream for desserts to getting an MRI screening, these are some of the inventions for which the University is known.

Whipped cream in a can

Whether you’ve sprayed whipped cream into your mouth or on a Thanksgiving dessert, you’ve got the University’s Charles Getz and his professor George Frederick Smith to thank for inventing Instantwhip. 

In the 1930s, Getz, graduate student studying chemistry, was experimenting with the uses of carbonation in food preservation at the Noyes Laboratory. 

Getz developed the instant cream whip machine after discovering milk would foam if carbon dioxide were forced into it. This led Getz to realize that whipped cream could be stored under pressure in a can.

However, Getz noticed carbon dioxide changed the taste of the whipped cream. He would later switch to nitrous oxide, which did not have this effect.

Getz patented his creation, and Smith used the method to create Instantwhip Foods. Twelve plants in the United States continue to develop Instantwhip products today.

LEDs

Light-emitting diodes are everywhere — in everyday objects like traffic lights, flashlights, remote controls and more. Former electrical engineering professor Nick Holonyak Jr. developed the LED at the General Electric laboratory. 

Instead of using gallium arsenide — a material used to make infrared LEDs — Holonyak used another semiconductor material called gallium arsenide phosphide to create an LED that emitted red light.

LEDs have been used beyond elevators and lamps. In produce factories, lettuce is widely cultivated under LEDs, with the combination of red and blue LEDs producing dark green leaves suitable for higher photosynthesis rates. LEDs have also been shown to reduce inflammation and pain for various musculoskeletal conditions.

“I don’t know how many possible applications are out there,” Holonyak said in a 2005 Lincoln Academy interview. “(There are) all kinds — and that’s human creativity.”

Sound in movies

In the early 1900s, motion pictures with sound were nonexistent. Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner, University’s first research professor in Engineering, was among the first to incorporate sound into film.

According to University Library media preservation coordinator Joshua Harris, Tykociński-Tykociner collaborated with Jakob Kunz, professor in Engineering, who developed a photoelectric cell to be included at the heart of Tykociński-Tykociner’s film apparatus.

“(They) figured out the ability to change sound into pulses of light that were then able to be burned onto a film,” Harris said.

Once Tykociński-Tykociner developed an optical soundtrack, he successfully showcased sound on film for the first time publicly in 1922 in what is now known as the Materials Science and Engineering Building.

Tykociński-Tykociner’s film consists of several clips edited together. One clip showcases Tykociński-Tykociner’s wife ringing a bell, saying, “Did you hear the bell ring?” Other clips reveal a professor from the School of Music playing the violin and Tykociński-Tykociner speaking into a megaphone.

The original film strips are housed at the Main Library in the preservation services department. 

“It’s probably the most important film that is in this place,” Harris said.

Designing skyscrapers

While endless tourists visit the Willis Tower in downtown Chicago, not many know the man behind the skyscraper’s design. 

Fazlur Khan, alum of the University, pioneered tubular systems that revolutionized how tall buildings are built.

Inspired by vertical structures made of bamboo in his hometown of Dhaka in Bangladesh, Khan believed the most efficient way to build a skyscraper would be with a tube system.

Paul Armstrong, associate professor emeritus in FAA, likened tubular structures in tall buildings to a series of pencils at different heights bundled with a rubber band. The rubber band is akin to the belt trusses in skyscrapers that secure the building.

In the same way, the Willis Tower — formerly known as the Sears Tower — has columns at different heights surrounding the base of the building, creating a durable and stable structure, according to Armstrong.

“These systems enable architects to build at greater costs, greater heights than they had before,” Armstrong said. “Today, we’re beginning to look at buildings that can exceed those heights of the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Center and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.”

Magnetic resonance imaging

Paul C. Lauterbur, professor in LAS, invented magnetic resonance imaging, which revolutionized the medical field as a safe, noninvasive diagnostic tool that creates images of the inside of patients’ bodies.

Zhi-Pei Liang, professor in Engineering, said MRI devices use an external magnet, which generates an extremely powerful magnetic field. This force aligns the hydrogen nuclei in the body, a process Liang compared to a compass’ needle aligning with Earth’s magnetic field.

“Just like we expose the compass needle to the Earth’s magnetic field, it exposes those spins — molecular spins or atomic spin — to the large magnetic field that they all line up with, then you perturb that, then you get the signal,” Liang said.

Radio waves cause the aligned atoms to resonate, which then sends radio signals to a computer to be interpreted and develop an image.

Liang said Lauterbur’s MRI invention has advanced the medical field by detecting diseases at the molecular level.

“Now we can give you images of the molecular distribution,” Liang said. “This kind of (mapping) will allow us to detect new degenerate diseases like dementia, nodular (diseases) or multiple sclerosis.” 

Since the MRI was developed, it has been part of daily clinical routines in hospitals and has been used to advance research in the medical field. According to an article in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, about 40 million MRI scans are done in the U.S. annually.

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