Inventions from Missouri

Marceline‘s Walt Disney has been responsible for many technological advances in moviemaking, but the multiplane camera is one he actually invented. This series of cameras allowed animation to have depth to film through several layers of drawings.

Windsor’s Charles Stark Draper is known as one of the smartest men to ever live. He is responsible for so many inventions that it’s impossible to list. One thing he invented was a Stabilizing Gyroscope. Most don’t know what that is, but it has dozens of military applications including the guidance system for missiles. That became the basis for today’s autopilot systems on planes.

It all started with Bigfoot in the 1970s. Bob Chandler was the brainchild behind the jacked-up Ford F-250 4×4 at Midwest Four Wheel Drive in Ferguson. Bigfoot became an American icon and is considered the world’s first monster truck.

St. Joseph‘s William Goddard was the leading scientist at IBM that developed the magnetic disk storage device. His computer storage device could store 5,000,000 characters of information with the ability to retrieve it within 1 second.

The Eames Lounge Chair was hailed as a revolution for the high-end furniture market. Charles and Ray Eames from St. Louis came up with the design of this and numerous other chairs, along with other architectural designs.

J.P. Leggett of Carthage came up with an idea for a bed spring in 1883 that allowed people to sleep better after a hard day of work. He later teamed up with C.B. Platt and formed the mattress company known as Leggett and Platt.

Lloyd Espenschied of Baden is one of the men who invented coaxial cable for AT&T Bell Telephone in 1929. This product advancement made long distance telephone service possible by making it possible to carry thousands of simultaneous calls on circuits.

One of the many inventions by James Eads, the Diving Bell allowed him and his crews to pick up valuables on the bottom of the Mississippi River. He is also the first person to use steel in a bridge, which became the Eads Bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis.

There are a few brands that become so synonymous that you simply use the brand name to describe the product (think Kleenex, ChapStick, Jacuzzi, or Sharpie). That is certainly true of private planes known as the Learjets. They were the invention of Bill Lear of Hannibal which debuted in 1963.