This story originally ran in three consecutive editions of the Chicago Tribune — Jan. 12, 2014, Jan. 13, 2014 and Jan. 14, 2014.

When we consider Chicago’s future, we evoke its past. So we’ve put together a top 20 list of innovations that Chicago can claim since its beginnings on a frontier crossroad.

To research our collection of top Chicago innovations, we looked through the Chicago Tribune’s archives, consulted with the Museum of Science and Industry, pored over the Encyclopedia of Chicago, considered other lists and double-checked against organizations’ historical accounts, Tribune reports and other sources.

We invite you to read along, tell us what we might have overlooked, challenge our findings — some of which are based on rough historical accounts that may border on myth.

The march of the vacuum cleaner, and its future, was predicated on the questions all new ventures and new products seek to address: How bad is the customer’s pain? And how much does this new product relieve that pain?

Before 1868, before Chicago — before Ives W. McGaffey — “cleaning up” meant sweeping up. The most technological cleaners of the time were carpet sweepers. Before those, brooms.

Hiram H. Herrick of Boston submitted a patent for a carpet sweeper in 1858, but it wasn’t terribly efficient and didn’t catch on.

Daniel Hess, an Iowa man, turned in a patent in 1860 for a device with a rolling brush and an elaborate bellows that generated suction.

McGaffey took further the technology of the time, creating in 1868 something relatively light and compact, but with a tricky hand crank and an eyebrow-raising $25 price tag (who could afford such convenience?). With the help of the American Carpet Cleaning Co. of Boston, McGaffey sold models in Chicago and Boston. It is thought that most were lost in the Chicago Fire of 1871. Two McGaffey vacuums remain.

But innovation had marched on.

John S. Thurman, of St. Louis, introduced a gasoline-powered carpet cleaner in 1899 and, across the Atlantic, England’s Hubert Cecil Booth in 1901 introduced his “Puffing Billy.” It improved upon Yankee inventors’ ideas, refining them over the decades.

One thing true of the vacuum cleaner — as with any consumer product aimed at a common human need — is that a lot of people will try to build one better. And what could be more common than the desire to tidy up a bit?

He’d manned a barrel-factory cutting machine, stacked bricks in kilns, fitted shoes, managed a pair of country stores, then hustled lamps and dry goods as a traveling salesman. But his abiding sense that farmers were being cheated by backcountry merchants sparked the idea for which Chicago remembers his name.

His name was Aaron Montgomery Ward, and his idea was mail-order retail.

Store owners held local monopolies, and middlemen who hauled manufactured products to the countryside ran up prices. Ward’s plan was to buy up big-city inventory with cash, cut selling costs by eliminating retail overhead — and deliver dry goods to townsfolk at the nearest railroad station. It was a preposterously disruptive idea, the Amazon.com of its day.

Early investors balked, and it’s hard to imagine how Ward and two fellow employees scrounged the $1,600 in capital it took to amass startup inventory — or why they tried again after their first lot incinerated in the Great Chicago Fire. But together they rented a shipping room on North Clark Street and set out to describe a comprehensive offering of 163 products in their first mail-order catalog.

In 1872, they got started. In 1873, he bought out the partners. By other accounts, they quit.

The next year, the customers came.

City orders were expensive and difficult at first. Farmers were Ward’s primary market.

The most popular item in a catalog filled with pumps and feed cutters, threshers and engines ... was the sewing machine. As sales increased, so did Ward’s buying power, and so did the company’s offerings. Others, notably Sears, followed suit. By 1888, annual sales topped $1 million.

Ideas sell, but they rarely last.

When Ward’s closed its catalog business in 1985, it measured sales in the billions but still posted an annual loss. Contributing factors included the costs of printing and delivering a general-merchandise catalog for customers interested in niche merchandise.

The world needed another innovation: Targeted catalogs.

Or the Internet. Wards.com still lives.

A Swedish immigrant who picked up the idea in Pennsylvania may have made it better, but Chicago never was shy about exhibitions, or taking credit.

Behold: It was here, in 1893, that inventor Whitcomb L. Judson, the onetime peripatetic purveyor of band cutters and grain scales, revealed his patented “clasp locker” to the public at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. You’re probably wearing its intellectual-property progeny even now: Judson had created the proto-zipper.

By then, Judson held 14 patents, all for items in pneumatic streetcars, and none of them successful, before he finally pulled it together with his clasp locker.

Fashion always had a hand on the zipper. While working on pneumatic streetcars at Earle Manufacturing Co., the mechanical engineer also found it tedious to fasten the high-button boots in vogue at the time. His solution was a complicated hook-and-eye fastener that featured a “guide” to clasp a sequence of hooks and eyes to close and reopen a clothing item. It took him two years to convince the U.S. Patent Office that it was new. Once he did, he unveiled it swiftly at the World’s Fair.

It was originally designed for shoes, but Judson imagined wider horizons: It might be useful on gloves, he reasoned on his patent application. Perhaps mailbags. Or corsets.

The crowd at the Columbian Exposition swooned — over the Ferris wheel. Judson’s clasp locker kept popping open.

Undeterred, Judson, his manufacturing boss Harry Earle and partner Lewis Walker launched Universal Fastener Co., which relocated to Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, Swedish-American Otto Fredrik Gideon Sundback improved on Judson’s C-curity fastener by adding to the number of teeth per inch. Ten was enough to make the invention stick. By 1914, Sundback had it.

The design may have been more popular, but the name lacked zip: Sundback’s 1914 innovation was called ... the “Hookless No. 2.”

The name said it: No hook.

B.F. Goodrich popularized the name “zipper” for the sound it made when the company put the invention on its rubber boots in the 1920s. Judson was long gone before Sundback improved on his design. But at last, the descendant of Chicago’s clasp locker held fast.

Indoor baseball, mush ball, playground ball, kitten ball. Among Chicago’s many contributions to sports — and to company picnics and America culture — was softball.

The sport was first played indoors, in 1887 at Chicago’s Farragut Boat Club, and it got the name “softball” in 1926. Interest exploded in 1933 after a tournament at Chicago’s Century of Progress World’s Fair.

The first softball was a boxing glove tied up in its laces, the bat a stick.

The inventors were bored Ivy Leaguers.

Harvard and Yale alumni at the Farragut Boat Club gym created the game on Thanksgiving while waiting for the results of the annual Harvard-Yale football game.

An enthusiastic Yalie tossed the boxing glove at a Harvard alum, who swatted it away with a stick. On the right kind of afternoon, that qualifies as inspiration. George Hancock, a reporter for the Chicago Board of Trade, got credit for the idea.

The football score: Yale, 17, Harvard, 8. In Chicago, the softball score was 41-40, and it’s unclear who beat whom.

Nowadays, the Amateur Softball Association claims that more than 40 million people play the sport each summer, making it the top team participant sport in the United States.

Along the way, two separate species of the sport evolved.

The size of the ball changed often until the 20th century. Much of the world adopted the 12-inch game, which requires gloves and a field.

Chicago, not done innovating, stayed with a 16-inch ball — so you could play without gloves, on smaller fields or inside during abysmal weather.

What’s more correct? Ask a Chicagoan.

George Pullman was one of Chicago’s greatest industrialists, remembered for his luxurious rail cars and opportunistic — often demeaning — labor practices toward blacks.

The onetime Colorado gold broker developed the “palace car” sleeper in 1864, which brought luxury to the middle class, his black workers into the middle class and President Abraham Lincoln home from Washington to his final rest in Springfield.

The innovation was more than technical. With the Pullman car came the notion that luxury was more than a thing — it was a service.

So luxury aboard a Pullman sleeper car became synonymous also with service from Pullman porters. All were black.

Pullman had used his $100,000 investment in the “palace car” to gain a unique niche in the railroad-sleeping-car industry, by seizing on service as a critical complement to luxurious accommodations. Railroads effectively outsourced their luxury appointments to Pullman, his sleeper cars and his crew.

This was the late 1860s, when an enormous pool of skilled labor arrived on the market: the former house slaves of the Deep South. The Pullman cars were a leg up, but also demeaning, and a rolling sweatshop.

Passengers crossed the United States in luxury, paying many times the price of a railroad ticket to sleep overnight and dine in cars served by Pullman porters. In turn, Pullman porters traveled the country as well.

They brought with them copies of the pro-equality Chicago Defender newspaper, which played a role in influencing the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North — especially Chicago. The porters also bought phonograph records in cities and resold them in towns, spreading the popularity of jazz and blues artists nationwide.

Yet the porters endured undignified work requirements and grueling hours. And, when conditions didn’t improve, the porters unionized.

If you’re an African-American living outside the South, any jazz-loving American outside the river cities that incubated the music — or anyone without blue blood who indulges in an everyday luxury — you’re following a path blazed by those porters, put to work by George Pullman.

The mechanical dishwasher as a practical device emerged not from convenience, but from annoyance, when a wealthy woman in Shelbyville, south of Decatur, got tired of servants breaking her dishes after fancy dinner parties.

The stories about Josephine Cochran — she later added an “e” and became “Cochrane” — have the prairie patrician storming out to the woodshed to build the machine forthwith. Actually, she started doing the dishes herself, and probably for many years. But she wanted a machine that could do the job faster, without the risk of chipped china, and the yearning haunted her.

Joel Houghton had an 1850 patent for a device made of wood and cranked by hand, but it was neither practical nor widely adopted. Cochrane knew of no such patent.

“If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine,” several accounts have the Shelbyville socialite saying, “I’ll do it myself.”

And she did. It was 1886.

Cochrane measured her dishes, built wire compartments, and placed them inside a wheel inside a copper boiler.

It worked. Cochrane received Patent No. 355,139 for the first dishwashing machine, just after Christmas in 1886.

After her death, Hobart Manufacturing bought out her company and later released the dishwashers under the KitchenAid brand — now owned by Whirlpool.

Before he was assistant secretary of state at the close of World War II, before he published the Encyclopaedia Britannica, before he was appointed to the U.S. Senate — and before he introduced a resolution to expel Joseph McCarthy from the Senate — William Burnett Benton was a humble Yale graduate from Minnesota who introduced consumer preference research, and so revolutionized how consumer products are positioned.

It was 1928. Benton was working at Chicago’s Lord & Thomas advertising agency when owner Albert Lasker told him to land Colgate-Palmolive by impressing the toiletry powerhouse with market research. Benton worked night and day for two months to record housewives’ preferences for the products of each company.

The firm used the pioneering survey in its initial Colgate-Palmolive campaign and landed the account before the survey was completed.

And soon Benton formed a useful partnership — Benton & Bowles — with Chester Bowles. They moved to New York the next year despite having only one client: General Foods.

Incidentally, the first ad agency to establish a market research department was J. Walter Thompson of Chicago and New York, according to “Robertson’s Book of Firsts: Who Did What for the First Time.”

The staggering implications — you would know exactly which audience would prefer which magazine! — were coupled later with Benton’s work — you would know exactly which product attributes people would want!

Sociologist Gordon Hancock hated the idea. It was tantamount to cheating.

In a statement that must have brought grins to the faces of that up-and-coming generation of admen, Hancock decried in 1926: “Excessive scientific advertising takes undue advantage of the public.”

This was, of course, the point.

Among America’s eateries, Chicago cuisine is notable for its take on pizza: Thick as a stone slab, saucy and larger than life.

The families behind Chicago’s most famous pizza houses each lay claim to inventing the recipe, but one thing about the origins of deep-dish pizza is known pretty certainly:

It came to be in 1943 inside the kitchen of a converted 19th century mansion built with the Mears family’s lumber money at 29 E. Ohio St. — today the site of Pizzeria Uno.

Chicago produced a unique and enduring variation on traditional Italian and American pizzas. It had a coarse, crunchy crust and sauce on top of cheese. It was heavy on Italian sausage.

Nationally, pizza is a $30 billion industry, and it’s especially popular among Chicagoans. Pizzeria Uno and its sibling a block away, Pizzeria Due, now are part of a national chain, Uno, which boasts on its website that “Ike Sewell developed deep-dish pizza and opened a new type of restaurant at the corner of Ohio & Wabash.”

Nathan Mears’ old house would become Chicago legend — a pizzeria founded by Richard Novaretti, known as Ric Riccardo, the owner of Riccardo’s Restaurant, and his friend, Sewell, a Chicago liquor distributor. In their restaurant worked Rudy Malnati Sr., father of Lou Malnati and grandfather of the current owners of the Lou Malnati’s restaurant chain.

Riccardo and Sewell’s restaurant opened as The Pizzeria in 1943, became Pizzeria Riccardo soon afterward and settled in as Pizzeria Uno in 1955, when the partners opened Pizzeria Due in Mears’ daughter’s mansion across the street at Wabash Avenue and Ontario Street.

The personalities they gathered in that Ohio Street kitchen make it difficult, despite Uno’s website proclamation, to know exactly who came up with the recipes. Each person and the families stake claims to the “one true recipe.” They became the founders of Malnati’s, Pizano’s and Gino’s East, along with Uno.

More than a diversion, more than the first amusement park ride, the giant wheel imagined and built by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago “involved the services and the products of many different branches of art and industry,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

“Distinguished men named it the proudest achievement of modern engineering,” the Tribune reported that summer.

Conceived for entertainment, Ferris solved a deeper problem of the time: how to build lighter bridge spans. Ferris was a graduate of New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and worked as a bridge-builder in Pittsburgh. He foresaw the growing need for structural steel.

The Ferris wheel delivered in every respect. Its 45-foot axle was at the time the world’s largest hollow forging. Its height, 264 feet, was designed to rival the 1,063-foot Eiffel Tower of the 1889 Paris Exposition. (Chicago always appreciated a good rivalry.) Though nowhere near as tall, it was every bit the centerpiece of the fair. Just building it strained the engineering of the day.

At the time, about the only things as tall as the Ferris wheel were church steeples, the far-off skyscrapers of the growing Chicago skyline and the hot-air balloon that rose and fell on its tether at the fairground. Ferris’ legacy endures in the 150-foot-tall Ferris wheel that serves as the symbol of Chicago’s Navy Pier.

It’s hard to imagine the prairie farmscape without a farmyard, a red barn — and a tower silo. But until 1873, grain wasn’t stored in silos; it was stored in pits.

After Fred Hatch graduated from what is now the University of Illinois, he and his father, Lewis Hatch, built the first tower silo on their farm near Spring Grove in McHenry County.

At what was then the Illinois Industrial University, agriculture textbooks were scarce, and some had to be translated from French and German by professor Willard H. Bliss.

According to European pamphlets of the time, silage production involved burying entire corn plants in pits. The idea strikes us now — as it did Fred Hatch then — as backward.

Hatch took the established idea (putting corn in a pit) and added to it (extending the hole above ground). The Hatches lined a 6-foot pit with rocks and mortar and kept building higher — extending the walls 16 feet high inside their family barn. They built the floor of the new structure out of double-ply floorboard lined with tar paper.

The design reduced rain spoilage, made it faster to fill, pack and empty, and set the stage for another agricultural innovation — putting a separate roof on the silo, and building it outside.

Since programmer Linus Torvalds created Linux as a free source code in 1991, it has spread around the world as a useful, flexible operating system that serves as an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows and others.

But if Linux can be thought of as a common “language,” at least one powerful “dialect” originated at Fermilab near Batavia. In collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, and other labs and universities, Fermilab re-compiled a version of Linux — now called “Scientific Linux” because of its use in the global scientific community.

In 1997, Fermilab lead Scientific Linux developer Connie Sieh tinkered with a version of Linux distributed by Red Hat Inc. — a language attractive because it was free, could be installed in batches and was simple enough for scientists to install on their own, according to Fermilab’s website.

In 1998, Fermilab renamed it “FermiLinux,” and it became the language used to program physics experiments. By 2004, developers from Fermilab, CERN and other collaborators had polished it up into Scientific Linux for use in every high-energy physics lab.

The international language of science used to be Latin.

Now it is Scientific Linux.

More than 140,000 users run Scientific Linux, making it easier for scientists to work while visiting other institutions. The language is “spoken” at top universities, national labs, CERN and on the orbiting International Space Station. When scientists experiment with the world’s highest-energy physics, they program the experiments in Scientific Linux. One of those labs — the Large Hadron Collider — was where scientists from around the world collaborated to discover the Higgs boson, also referred to as the “God particle.”

If you listened to it on the radio, said many who did, Richard Nixon won. If you watched it on CBS television, as many more seemed to do, John Kennedy won. Nixon looked terrible.

Held at CBS Chicago on Sept. 26, 1960, in the old WBBM-TV studios at 630 N. McClurg Court, the first televised presidential debate was seen by about 70 million viewers. The faceoff pitting Nixon against Kennedy is credited with erasing Nixon’s lead in the polls.

Kennedy carried the election — by a whisker.

In the endless political postmortems that followed — and that still take place in college political science classes today — a few slip-ups on Nixon’s part were clear:

Nixon addressed Kennedy; Kennedy addressed the camera. Kennedy appeared poised and relaxed. Nixon looked sweaty. Some even thought he seemed sick. In 1950, 11 percent of Americans had TVs. In 1960, 88 percent of Americans did. They didn’t just read and listen to the news. They watched it.

Never again would political candidates ignore the power of television, and neither would they ignore the chance to leverage the media to their own advantage.

Politics had entered the age of appearance.

Facing a pending injunction on further work, but having come too far to stop now, a group of dignitaries stood on the side of a controversial canal bisecting the city of Chicago and watched.

A crane clawed off the final frozen feet between the sewage-swollen water pooling below downtown in the Chicago River and the 28-mile-long Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal leading to the great rivers of the Plains.

The efforts of eight years and 8,500 workers culminated Jan. 2, 1900, when foul water sluiced through the crane-carved gap, sliced into the fresh banks and tumbled toward Lockport and the Des Plaines River — west! — instead of into Lake Michigan as North America’s ancient glaciers had prescribed.

The last two people out of the rapidly filling ditch, just ahead of the turgid waters, were a pair of enterprising newspaper reporters. They recorded the completion of one of the great engineering feats of the day, involving new machines and methods for moving earth. The same machines and methods would be used to carve out the Panama Canal a few years later.

Legalities remained, yes, but the job was done.

The long problem of protecting the city’s drinking water had at last been solved. When the gates at Lockport chugged open later, the Illinois River ultimately swelled with Chicago’s pent-up effluence, and the city’s days of waterborne disease swept away with the subsiding flood.

The reversal of the Chicago River created its own problems: It flushed big-city waste into prairie rivers and forever altered local hydrology. But it opened the door to still further advancements. In 1930, the world’s largest water-reclamation plant was built on the Sanitary and Ship Canal’s banks in Cicero, eventually processing more than 1.4 billion gallons of daily waste from nearly 3 million people across 260 square miles.

There’s a reason the American Society of Civil Engineers honored Chicago’s wastewater treatment designs: From the earliest times until the end of the 19th century, people stewed in the filth of their own creation. With the advent of wastewater treatment, cities become much more equipped to deal with population influx — reducing infant mortality and morbidity and improving control and prevention of communicable diseases.

As the turbid roiling of the reversed Chicago River grew calm and steady, another barrier had been overcome.

Life around water had improved.

Henry Gerber, immigrant and World War I Army enlistee, came to Chicago to live near other German-speaking immigrants. After seeing how people with different sexual orientations were treated here, he championed the plight of gays in American society.

He emigrated from Germany in 1913. In 1917, he was temporarily committed to a mental institution because of his sexual orientation, according to the book “Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context,” edited by Vern L. Bullough.

Gerber enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in Germany from 1920 to 1923 as a printer and proofreader, and he worked as a writer and organizer most of his life.

In 1924, having been inspired by the work of German Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which fought anti-homosexual German laws, Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights in Chicago. It was the first American homosexual rights organization and a precursor to the modern gay-liberation movement. The group published a newsletter, “Friendship and Freedom,” the country’s first documented gay civil-rights publication.

Gerber found few allies: Medical and psychological professionals were afraid to ruin their reputations by involvement, and few gays were willing to join. Before long, the group’s advocacy upset relatives of its thin membership, at least one of whom had a wife and children. After a series of arrests in summer 1925, the Society for Human Rights disbanded.

Its members, however, informed other gay rights groups around the country, including the Mattachine Society founded in Los Angeles in 1950. Gerber later moved to New York City and worked on gay rights until his death in Washington in 1972.

He lived long enough to see Illinois become the first state to repeal its sodomy laws in 1962. Gerber was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 1992. His apartment on North Crilly Court is a Chicago landmark.

With his invention in 1831, Cyrus McCormick of Virginia reaped increased food production on the U.S. and, later, manufacturing on Chicago.

The mechanical reaper was the pride of several members of the McCormick family, but Cyrus got it right, filed the patent and showed it to the neighbors. When demand among Virginia farmers outstripped McCormick’s ability to build the contraption on the family farm, he turned first to a New York factory and ultimately to Chicago to mass-produce them.

By 1848, as the prairie was opening, his company was on track to produce 500 reapers for the autumn harvest. They were built in a factory on the North Bank of the Chicago River and sold with a “full refund guarantee,” an innovative marketing technique now commonplace.

But it was not how they were sold that made history. It was the problem they solved: The McCormick reaper reduced the amount of people it took to work a farm — just in time for the gold discoveries in the American West and the scarcity of labor they produced in the Midwest.

McCormick died in Chicago in 1884, two years before his company’s factories were the site of urban strikes that led to the Haymarket Riot.

Through a merger, the legacy of his company — the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. — survived as International Harvester.

McCormick’s great-grandnephew, Brooks McCormick, served in the 1970s as chief executive of International Harvester, which became Navistar. The McCormick family’s business and cultural influence, which included former Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick — great-nephew of Cyrus — continues to span the Chicago area.

Chicago, incorporated in 1833 with a population of 350, began innovating as soon as it was born. Poised on the prairie’s stoop as the West was opening, Chicago created a lasting contribution to the way Americans live by taking advantage of demographic and technological trends.

There were 24 states, U.S. population was nearing 13 million, and America was leaning west. The cost of nails was falling thanks to Jacob Perkins’ nail machine, patented 38 years earlier in Massachusetts and refined by Eli Whitney and others. The forests had plenty of timber left to cut.

But traditional building methods required hand-hewn beams, hand-wrought mortise and tenon joints, lapped half dovetails, and something more crucial — labor-intensive construction at a time when labor was spread too thin.

Then in Chicago, Augustine Taylor got credit for creating balloon-frame construction, a hammer-and-nails forerunner to the light-frame construction that still dominates U.S. housing.

In the first half of the 19th century, it was hard to imagine a contribution so life-changing. In retrospect, it’s impossible not to have seen it coming. America was outgrowing its roots, and if Americans had tried to keep building as usual, they wouldn’t have been able to afford the time or the cost.

Taylor dedicated his work to God, and professional carpenters of the time might have scoffed that the only thing holding up his buildings was the power of prayer. There were no fancy joints. Just boards and nails.

Experienced builders supposedly derided Taylor’s St. Mary’s Church in Fort Dearborn as “balloon-framed” because it looked like a stiff breeze would blow it away. But many accounts suggest the name came from a similar French Missouri type of construction called maison en boulin.

Whatever the origin of “balloon frame,” while eastern America assembled entire walls on the ground with hand-hewn joints, lifted into place by a crew of 20 laborers, Taylor and his crew hammered together precut sawmilled two-by-fours and two-by-sixes.

It was cheaper. It was quicker. And it took only two workers with rudimentary skills.

Chicago architect John M. Van Osdel attributed the invention to Chicago carpenter George W. Snow in 1832. The Chicago History Museum and other scholars point out that Virginia carpenters in the 17th century — facing similar pressures to build fast — employed similar techniques. But it wasn’t mass-produced as Chicago was prepared to do. Between 1866 and 1875, the Lyman Bridges Co. of Chicago, one of several purveyors of so-called sectionalized housing, sold prefab balloon-frame structures to Western settlers.

But the construction style foreshadowed another chapter in Chicago history. In those balloon-framed homes, studs ran from the foundation to the roof, a long open space that channeled flames up the full length of a wall in a burning building. Modern wood framing interrupts those lines.

As Chicago elevated the vertical frontier of its first skyline, balloon frames set the stage for the Great Fire of 1871.

The first successful open-heart surgery took place on Chicago’s South Side on July 9, 1893. The patient was James Cornish, a young man with a knife wound to the chest from a barroom brawl. The surgeon, who had gone into medicine because he disliked earlier work as a shoemaker’s apprentice, was Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.

The surgery took place in Provident Hospital, the city’s first interracial hospital, which Williams helped found. Both patient and surgeon were African-American.

Medical textbooks of the time said that operating on a human heart was too dangerous, and there was no precedent for opening the chest, longtime Tribune science and medical reporter Ronald Kotulak wrote more than a century later.

Despite lacking X-rays, antibiotics, adequate anesthesia or other tools of modern surgery, Williams stepped in.

“With a scalpel, he cut a small hole in Cornish’s chest,” Kotulak wrote, “carefully picking his way past nerves, muscle, blood vessels and ribs until he reached the rapidly beating heart. Exploring the wound, Williams found a severed artery. He closed it with sutures, but then discerned an inch-long gash in the pericardium, the tough sac that surrounds the heart. The heart itself had only been nicked and did not need sutures. But the damaged sac had to be closed. With Cornish’s heart beating 130 times a minute beneath his nimble fingers, Williams closed the wound with catgut.”

Cornish lived, and Williams went on to acclaim. In 1894, Williams was appointed chief surgeon at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., which gave care to formerly enslaved blacks.

As surgery became safer, Chicago emerged as an incubator for surgical innovation. At one point, 1 in 4 American physicians received training directly or indirectly from Cook County Hospital doctors.

Chances are good there’s a cellular phone or smartphone in your pocket. You may be reading this item on a smartphone. If so, you have at your fingertips the technological descendant of Chicago inventor Martin Cooper — Korean War submariner, product of the Illinois Institute of Technology, innovator at Motorola.

And father of the cellphone.

Cooper says he drew his inspiration for the hand-held telephone from an episode of “Star Trek” when Capt. James T. Kirk whipped open a communicator.

The result was U.S. Patent No. 3,906,166, filed Oct. 17, 1973, for a “Radio Telephone System,” which included both the phone and the tower network to connect it. Cooper shared the patent with seven others. Cooper was born Dec. 26, 1928, and became an electrical engineer with 11 patents in wireless communications. When he joined Motorola in 1954, it was his second job as a post-Navy civilian. As a senior development engineer in Motorola’s mobile equipment group, he developed portable hand-held police radios and the like until the early 1970s, when he was head of Motorola’s communications systems division.

There already were car phones, and telephone companies long had been willing to string in wires to connect workers in temporary offices. But people move around, even beyond roads, homes and offices. Cooper’s insight was that phone numbers might be assigned to a person rather than a geographical location. It turned the status quo on its ear.

You could call anyone, anywhere.

Cooper assembled the team that designed and built the first mobile phone, a process that took just 90 days and resulted in a 2.5-pound, 10-inch-long groundbreaking monstrosity as ponderous as it was miraculous. Even its inventors dubbed it “The Brick.”

When Motorola finally brought it to market in 1983, the company told the public it was the DynaTAC 8000X (for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage). Motorola boasted of its enormous battery that could support a 60-minute phone conversation — and charged folks $3,995 — more than $9,000 when adjusted to 2013 dollars.

Motorola spent $100 million on the project between 1973 and 1993 before ever seeing profits on it, Cooper later said.

Yet while the analog networks that the DynaTAC used became obsolete — as did those big gray bricks — the steadfast efforts of Cooper, his team and his Chicago-area employers pioneered the mobile digital lifestyle most of us now take for granted.

Perhaps no innovation defines Chicago as much as its architecture — chiefly its muscular skyscrapers. Towering skylines were born and refined here, and they remain the source of innovation.

Until architect and engineer William Le Baron Jenney’s novel solution to reduce construction materials, cities could only get as big as they had room to spread out.

With the 1884 advent in Chicago of skeletal construction — in this case, granite piers supporting a web of internal iron works — buildings, and cities, could grow up.

The first such building was the Home Insurance Building at Adams and LaSalle streets, rising 10 stories to 138 feet before additions, and supported inside by a matrix of cast and wrought iron. The Ditherington Flax Mill in England incorporated iron framing but was only five stories high. In Chicago, the plan was to build tall.

That was the case elsewhere. Leroy Buffington wanted to build a 28-story “stratosphere-scraper” in Minneapolis in 1888. People mocked him, but by then the idea was set. Every skyscraper after that employed Jenney’s innovation — until Skidmore, Owings & Merrill used a fireproof all-concrete core to build Chicago’s Trump Tower, completed in 2008.

Cities would only get taller. The skyscraper had arrived.

The world entered the nuclear age on a clear, chilly afternoon in Chicago. It was in the middle of the Second World War: German troops had dug in at Stalingrad, U.S. troops had landed in North Africa, and, inside a pile of black bricks and wooden timbers stacked under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s abandoned football field, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi directed young George Weil to pull out the final graphite rod slowing runaway neutrons as they fizzed off pellets of unstable uranium.

True to his calculations, the uranium-235 inside Chicago Pile-1 heated up and went critical. The world’s first self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction began — clearing a path for the atomic bomb, nuclear power plants and the nuclear proliferation.

The time was 3:25 p.m. Dec. 2, 1942. Speeding free neutrons flaked off still more free neutrons, each excited particle cracking more uranium nuclei apart as a group of the world’s top physicists looked on.

Fermi had theorized and experimented in the 1930s with radioactive decay in thorium and uranium. Hungarian immigrant Leo Szilard had conceived of nuclear chain reactions in 1933.

The Hungarian also was credited with writing most of the letter to President Franklin Roosevelt signed by Szilard’s former academic supervisor — and world’s most famous scientist — Albert Einstein. Einstein’s letter warned that atomic fission and nuclear bombs were just around the scientific corner, and that Nazi Germany was mining Czechoslovakian uranium.

Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bombs that the U.S. used against Japan, set off the Cold War against the Soviet Union and ushered in an era of civilian nuclear power that keeps the lights on for millions around the world — and still scares the daylights out of many more.

The first fission reaction occurred in strict secrecy — and under the nose of one of America’s most populous cities.

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