As a CU student, alum or supporter, you can take pride in the amazing discoveries and inventions that have been created by people in your community. 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.

1. Post-it Note Adhesive

You might use them to leave reminders or label your lunch. Maybe you’re a Post-it traditionalist who uses them for the originally intended purpose — to bookmark your pages. No matter what you stick them to, you can thank CU alum Spencer Silver (PhDA&S’66). While working as a senior chemist for 3M’s Central Research Labs in 1968, Silver developed the reusable adhesive that eventually became a main component of Post-it Notes, which launched in 1980.  

Learn more about the invention of the Post-it adhesive.

2. Liquid Crystals

Researchers at CU Boulder, led by physics professor Ivan Smalyukh, have designed new kinds of liquid crystals that mirror the complex internal structure of some solid crystals. The group’s findings, published in the journal Nature, could one day be used to create new, more energy efficient types of smart windows and television and computer displays.

Learn more about liquid crystals.

3. 3D Printing

Late one night in 1983, CU alum Chuck Hull (EngrPhys’61) made a scientific breakthrough with his creation of a small plastic cup. Although seemingly unassuming, the cup was the first object to be created using stereolithography, better known as 3D printing. Hull’s discovery became the basis for the 3D printing that is a common practice across industries and homes today. After securing a patent for stereolithography in 1986, he founded his company, 3D Systems. Hull is now a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Learn more about the invention of 3D Printing.

4. Dry Fogger

In 1982, after freezing solid the set of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video for 20 hours, CU alum Jim Doyle (Thtr’78) thought there had the be a better way to create fog than with liquid nitrogen. Doyle got to work and created a fog machine, which quickly became the industry standard. By 1986, Doyle’s dry fogger was used on the opening night of Alice Cooper’s “Nightmare Returns” tour. Later, Doyle received a 1992 Academy Award for its use in Terminator 2.

Learn more about the dry fogger.

5. Inhalable Measles Vaccine

In 2010, a team of researchers led by CU chemistry and biochemistry professor Robert Sievers developed an inhalable measles vaccine, which works when patients breathe in a puff of dry powder. One main goal of the inhalable inoculation is to mitigate needle use, as needles can be scary to some and can pose difficulties in disposal.

6. Lasers

In 1960, CU alum Theodore Maiman (EngrPhys’49) developed the laser with the help of his research assistant Charles Asawa. At the age of 32, Maiman had invented an essential technology that is now used across all aspects of life, ranging from manufacturing to surgery to grocery store checkout scanners. Maiman was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1984.

Learn more about the invention of lasers.

7. Bose-Einstein Condensate

In 1995, in a laboratory at JILA, a joint institute of CU Boulder and NIST, CU Boulder physics professor Carl E. Wieman and colleague Eric A. Cornell, a research physicist and NIST fellow, led the team that produced the first Bose-Einstein condensate, which is a group of atoms chilled almost to absolute zero. When a group of atoms is in this state, they begin to act as though they are a single atom, which lends itself to superconductive properties. For this discovery, Wieman and Cornell were awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics.

8. TiVo

You’re living in the age of Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max, so it might be hard to remember what having cable is even like. But before the streaming giants took over, TiVo was a leader in on-demand television. In 1997, CU alum Jim Barton (ElEngr, CompSci’80; MCompSci’82) and business partner Mike Ramsey founded what would become TiVo, which was best known for the device that allowed viewers to record and save television programs onto a hard drive for later viewing, and to pause and rewind live TV.

Learn more about the invention of TiVo.

9. Quantum Squeezing

In their efforts to better understand dark matter — the substance that likely makes up most of the universe’s mass — a group of scientists, including many at CU’s JILA research institute, developed quantum squeezing. In February 2021, led in part by CU alum Daniel Palken (MPhys’18; PhD’20) and NIST fellow Konrad Lehnert, the scientists found that their new approach to searching for axions allows them to better separate the signals of axions from the less relevant signals of quantum fluctuations. All this is to say that this method puts the scientific community one step closer to understanding the mysterious dark matter.

10. Body Battery

In 2021, Jianliang Xiao, a mechanical engineering associate professor at CU Boulder, created a small, wearable device that uses thermoelectric generators to convert body heat into power. The device is made from polyimine, a material that is stretchy and can heal itself. The hope is that this fully recyclable gadget can someday help power fitness watches and other wearable devices.

Learn more about this wearable device.

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Goodbye, Liquid Nitrogen

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.

All that fog crawling through the tombstones looks deliciously creepy. But to special-effects hand Jim Doyle (Thtr’78) and crew, it was also “an expensive pain in the ass.”

“We used tons of liquid nitrogen, which froze the set solid for 20 hours,” says Doyle, who later won an Academy Award in technical achievement. “The guys had a terrible time breaking it apart. I thought, ‘There has got to be an easier way to do that.’”

Doyle went home determined to invent a theatrical fog machine that would neither freeze a set nor choke performers. Months later, he introduced a prototype on the set of the TV show Kids, Inc.

His “dry fogger” blasts cold, dry nitrogen over a hot-water source in a small cloud chamber. The nitrogen attracts molecular water, condenses it into tiny droplets and vents cool, dry fog.

Doyle arrived at a formula allowing him to build dry foggers on any scale.

“This device provides an atmosphere at 100 percent relative humidity, so it is wringing all the fog possible per unit of [nitrogen],” he says. “The bigger the machine, the more efficient and controllable it becomes. Theoretically one could make one the size of a semitrailer.”

Later he met a props assistant for shock rocker Alice Cooper.

“He wanted to have dancers lying in the fog for four to six minutes,” Doyle says.

Cooper’s producer, Joe Gannon, fronted money for a machine that could fog a large stage, which Doyle delivered in time for the Santa Barbara opening of Cooper’s 1986 “Nightmare Returns” tour.

“That was the first one,” says Doyle, 59, who also created Freddy Krueger’s blade-fingered glove for the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

Once operated manually and now automated, the technology became and remains the industry standard. It has been used in countless films, by musicians as varied as Alabama and Janet Jackson, and in major opera and Broadway productions, such as The Lion King. Doyle received the 1992 Academy Award for the dry fogger’s use in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator 2.

Today Doyle designs high-tech water features for Los Angeles-based WET Design. He was lead engineer on the fire-and-water cauldron for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and he designed the fountain for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. He’s created dream-sequence effects for Le Rêve at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel and a pool in the University Theatre for CU’s 2014 production of Metamorphoses.

“Water, fire, fog, smoke, ice,” Doyle says, “I do it all.

© Karpov Sergei/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis

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See No Evil

Right after Theodore Maiman (EngrPhys’49) successfully developed the laser in 1960, newspapers reported that a Los Angeles scientist had invented a death ray. Later, actress Bette Davis allegedly cornered Maiman at a cocktail party and asked him if he felt guilty for creating the device, according to a Los Angeles Times article.

He didn’t, as the laser quickly revealed itself to be an indispensable tool for everything from surgery and supermarket check-out scanners to satellite tracking and lab research. At least 10 Nobel Prize winners’ work since has been made possible because of lasers, according to Charles H. Townes, the 1964 Nobel Prize winner in Physics.

Maiman, who repaired electronics while at CU-Boulder and for a time aspired to be a comedian, was just 32 when he created the first laser. A junior scientist at Hughes Research Laboratories, he was given $50,000, an assistant and nine months to build a laser. His assistant, Charles Asawa, came up with a novel idea that proved key to their success — using a photographic flash rather than a movie projector lamp to illuminate a ruby rod with silver-coated surfaces.

Anxious to explore the laser’s possibilities, Maiman left Hughes and started several laser-oriented companies.

While he was nominated two times for the Nobel Prize, he never won. In 1984 Maiman was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, joining Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. He died May 5, 2007, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Amid its positive contributions to society, the laser’s reputation as a death ray lodged itself firmly in pop culture. A Death Star laser blew up Princess Leia’s home planet in Star Wars and Dr. Evil cooked up elaborate laser plots in the film Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. One plan was to demand a hefty ransom from the world by threatening to use his laser to punch a hole in the ozone layer, leaving all humans more susceptible to skin cancer.

“That already has happened,” Dr. Evil’s adviser tells him.

While the laser played no role in the ozone’s destruction, perhaps it can help fix it.

Illustration by John Cuneo

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...Stays in Vegas

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 early 2003 the tagline “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” was introduced to the public at the forefront of a new campaign from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority aimed at revitalizing the city’s image of adult freedom. Hoff and co-worker Jeff Candido at the advertising firm R&R Partners came up with the now-famous concept separately.

“We often do that as creatives,” Hoff says. “We go off on our own and come up with stuff, then come together and talk about it. This time we both had basically the same idea, with some variation. So we knew it was strong.”

The pair presented their tagline and wrote many alternate ways to express the idea, such as “anything goes” or “you never know,” but the original “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” remained the favorite.

The campaign is still in use today, and the tagline earned a permanent place on New York’s Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame in 2011.

“I still hear celebrities using it, movies using it,” says Hoff, creative director of digital integration at the advertising and marketing agency Grey Group. “I feel proud to hear it being used and adapted. But the most interesting thing to see now is how tourists actually believe it when they go to Las Vegas.”

Despite its roaring success, Hoff says the tagline hasn’t defined his career.

“Believe it or not, in advertising most people don’t care about something they did 10 years ago,” he says. “But every now and then it’s brought up in a meeting, and it’s usually a meeting stopper. I’m asked to tell at least one story.”

Photography ©iStock.com/compassandcamera

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The Sticky Yellow Square 

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. It could be reused several times before it lost its stick. Unsure what to do with his creation, Silver tried to interest his colleagues at 3M in his invention.

“It was part of my job as a researcher to develop new adhesives, and at that time we wanted to develop bigger, stronger, tougher adhesives,” he told CNN. “This was none of those.”

Five years passed before new 3M product development researcher Arthur Fry had an idea. Fry sang in a church choir, and every time he opened his hymnal his bookmark fell out. Tired of picking it up, he realized Silver’s adhesive was just what he needed to keep his bookmark in place. Voilà, the concept of the Post-it note was born, and the product launched in 1980. Two years after appearing on the market, the iconic yellow notes had become a staple for offices, schools and homes. Today, more than 50 billion Post-it note products are sold every year. 

As for Silver, his name appears on more than 22 U.S. patents.

Photo by iStock.com/bluestocking 

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