Images Courtesy of Getty Images/Underwood Archives (canoe); Minnesota Historical Society (middling, thermostat, toaster, water skis, boots, Jones, Polaris, post-it); Shutterstock: Digitalreflections (Twister), By Kovaleva_Ka (apple)
Minnesota inventions
900
Ojibwe begin paddling toward Mni Sota Makoce in their birchbark canoes
According to oral tradition, the Ojibwe begin paddling toward Mni Sota Makoce in their birchbark canoes. With lightweight bark pitched over curbed cedar ribs, the canoe replaces the dugout and revolutionizes freight transportation.
1869
middlings purifier
While working in Cadwallader C. Washburn’s mill, itinerant Montreal engineer Edmund La Croix produces the middlings purifier. Every local miller “borrows” La Croix’s design, which magically produces a fine flour from our gray winter wheat.
1882
Duluth’s Camille Poirier receives his patent for the Duluth Pack, a soft-sided bag that can hold everything necessary for a Boundary Waters trip (except your favorite sweater you forgot at home) without scratching your Kevlar canoe.
1885
thermostat
Swiss-born immigrant Albert Butz invents the “damper flapper,” a device that can control a furnace damper via a thermostat, saving a trip to the basement to regulate the furnace by hand. The billion-dollar idea eventually births Honeywell.
1919
pop up toaster
Sick and tired of his perpetually burnt toast at lunch in the factory cafeteria in Stillwater, Charles Strite invents the pop-up toaster.
1922
water skis
River rat Ralph Samuelson spends hours upon hours refining his attempt to bend pine boards into the perfect—and å—pair of water skis. Can you imagine getting up for the first time ever on a glassy Lake Pepin?
1930
Richard Drew, the same guy who invented masking tape for 3M, does it again. Scotch Tape not only has a classy name; it also allows poor people barely making it through the Depression to invisibly patch up all their broken stuff.
1934
boots
Charles Beckman, whose Red Wing Shoe Company was favored by macho loggers, farmers, and miners, invents the steel-toe boot to protect their itsy-bitsy tootsy-wootsies.
1938
Frederick McKinley Jones
The “Black Thomas Edison,” Frederick McKinley Jones, is asked by his employer to invent a refrigerated truck. Jones does it, creating a new global marketplace for perishables and earning himself another nickname: “King of Cool.”
1950
Rose Joshua, Fannie Shanfield, and Mary Abrahamson of the Hadassah Society of Minnesota bring a gugelhupf cake pan to H. David Dalquist of Nordic Ware. Did somebody say gugelhupf? Dalquist can’t, so he trademarks the Bundt cake pan.
1956
snowmobile
Roseau’s Edgar Hetteen rejiggers his farm machinery company into a snowmobile manufacturer, Polaris Industries, realizing the mass-market potential of a machine that goes as fast as possible over frozen lakes.
1964
Twister
Reyn Guyer invents a game called Pretzel that eventually gets bought and marketed by an unreasonably uptight Milton Bradley as Twister. Guyer follows it up with Nerf balls in 1970. This guy knew how to have good, soft fun.
1980
Dr. Spencer Silver
In the late ’60s, Dr. Spencer Silver fails to make the world’s most powerful sticky tack. In fact, it’s so un-sticky that it’s reusable. His colleague Art Fry digs up Silver’s low-energy adhesive and uses it to create the Post-it.
1982
Pillsbury introduces frozen microwave popcorn, but eventually Edina upstart Act II pops its bubble, inventing a shelf-stable microwave popcorn that doesn’t require the waste of valuable freezer space.
1994
Dave Kapell, a frustrated, completely blocked musician, cuts typed-out words and glues them to sheets of magnets, inventing that delightful-slash-annoying Magnetic Poetry stuck on fridges around the world.
2006
Honey crisp apple
The Minnesota State Legislature formally recognizes the U of M’s Honeycrisp apple—first planted in 1962!—as the GOAT of apples by officially naming it Minnesota’s state fruit.
2020
Vault Health, along with RUCDR Infinite Biologics and Spectrum Solutions, releases the first COVID-19 saliva test given approval by the FDA, saving thousands of Minnesotans from having to uncomfortably swab the fronts of their brains.
