Inventions

CU is full of innovators, who have changed the world in ways both big and small. Here are 10 inventions and discoveries made by CU faculty and alumni.

October 1982. Los Angeles. Ghouls rise from a fog-fingered graveyard and join a zombified Michael Jackson in one of history’s most iconic bits of choreography in the watershed “Thriller” video, a mini-horror flick built around the eponymous hit song.

Right after Theodore Maiman (EngrPhys’49) successfully developed the laser in 1960, newspapers reported that a Los Angeles scientist had invented a death ray.

We all know that what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there, thanks to the creative slogan penned by Jason Hoff (Jour’00) and a colleague.

In 1968 Spencer Silver (PhDA&S’66), a senior chemist at 3M’s Central Research Labs, developed a peculiar adhesive. Made out of tiny bubbles, it was strong enough to hold papers together but weak enough that they could be pulled apart.