A Mizzou Timeline of Accomplishments

1636 The first institution of higher education in the British North American colonies, Harvard College, is established at Cambridge, Mass. Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, universities follow the English model's emphasis on general education in the classics, the humanities, religious instruction and morality.
1752 Benjamin Franklin's kite experimentExperimenting with a key tied to a kite, Benjamin Franklin discovers that lightning is a form of electricity.
1839 The Geyer Act establishes the University of Missouri in Columbia. It is the first publicly supported higher education institution west of the Mississippi River.
1862 Abraham LincolnPresident Abraham Lincoln signs the Morrill Act, which creates the nation's land-grant universities.
1870 The University of Missouri is given land-grant status under the Morrill Act and founds the College of Agriculture in Columbia and a School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla.
1873 GrapesMU lecturer and Missouri State Entomologist Charles V. Riley helps save the French wine industry from a vine-ravaging aphid by grafting resistant Missouri rootstock onto French vines.
Late
1800s		 American universities begin to follow the German model's focus on scientific research and advanced study.
1879 Edison's carbon filament bulb Thomas Edison invents the carbon filament light bulb.
1890 Congress passes a second Morrill Act, which creates what are now known as historically black universities and provides more support to land-grant institutions.
1900 Fourteen universities, including Cornell, Stanford and Yale, create the Association of American Universities (AAU) to provide standards for doctoral programs. They establish modern American higher education's emphasis on undergraduate education and research.
1903 Wright Brothers airplaneThe Wright Brothers make the world's first successful airplane flight.
1910 University of Missouri Extension begins spreading the benefits of University research to the citizens of Missouri.
1911 Psychology faculty member Max Meyer publishes the first psychology text to make an empirical link between psychology and physiology.
1914 Walter Williams, dean of MU's School of Journalism, writes The Journalist's Creed, a standard for practicing professional journalism that stands the test of time.
1917 Soil erosion in farm fieldMU scientists are the first to conduct soil-erosion research. Their work prompts Congress to create experiment stations nationwide to develop techniques of resting eroded land and dealing with droughts.
1927 LeavesMU geneticist Lewis J. Stadler discovers that radiation multiplies mutations in plants, a breakthrough that leads to faster development of new varieties of plants.
1945 With the end of World War II, the U.S. federal government realizes the need for scientific and technological research at its best universities. At MU, William Albrecht collects a soil sample from Sanborn Field that provides the golden mold used to make the penicillin-like drug Aureomycin.
1950 Congress creates the National Science Foundation, which awards federal funds to researchers at the nation's top institutions.
1952 Jonas Salk successfully inoculates volunteers with the polio vaccine.
1953 Francis Crick and James Watson create the first visual model of DNA.
1950s WheatResearch by MU geneticist Ernie Sears, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and his wife, geneticist Lotti Sears, helps create a strain of wheat that is resistant to rust disease and is later used as a food source worldwide.
1957 Sputnik IThe Soviet Union initiates the Space Age with the successful launch of Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite.
1963 The University of Missouri, which already included campuses in Columbia and Rolla, becomes a four-campus system by acquiring the University of Kansas City and creating another campus in St. Louis. The Columbia campus remains the largest and most comprehensive in the system.
1966 Bone scan showing the radiopharmaceutical Quadramet at workMU completes construction on its world-class Research Reactor Center, which focuses on nuclear medicine research, including medical diagnostic tools and radiopharmaceuticals.
1970 MU scientist John C. Schuder develops the fist automatic and completely implanted defibrillator for the human heart.
1973 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching publishes its first classification of American colleges and universities, grouping schools together by the number and scope of their degree programs. MU is grouped among the nation's best universities that confer the most doctoral degrees and participate in the most federally funded research.
1982 MU cardiologist Zuhdi Lababidi with newbornMU pediatric cardiologist Zuhdi Lababidi performs the world's first pediatric angioplasty, which corrects aortic valve stenosis in newborns.
1999 CapsulesMU chemists Jerry Atwood, Leonard Barbour and William Orr publish research that paves the way for better electronic devices and “smart” drugs, which deliver treatment to cells that need it.
2002 PigsMU's Randall Prather along with Immerge BioTherapeutics, clones the first miniature swine with a specific gene that causes human rejection “knocked out” of their DNA. The feat takes scientists a step closer to the possibility of pig-to-human organ transplantation.
2003 A team of MU researchers led by Professor Wynn Volkert wins a $10 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to create a cancer imaging center to foster new methods of cancer detection and treatment.
2004 MU's Life Sciences Center opens. With funding from federal, state and private sources, the new center facilitates collaboration among faculty across disciplines to improve food, health and the environment.