| 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
|
 Experimenting 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
|
 President
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 |
 MU 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
1890
|
 Thomas
Edison invents the carbon filament light bulb.
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 |
 The 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 |
 MU 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 |
 MU 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 |
 Research 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 |
 The 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 |
 MU 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 pediatric cardiologist Zuhdi Lababidi
performs the world's first pediatric angioplasty, which
corrects aortic valve stenosis in newborns.
|
| 1999 |
 MU 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 |
 MU'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. |
