Did you know....

The first heart pacemaker was invented here at the University of Minnesota. Earl Bakken, a University electrical engineering graduate, designed the battery-operated pacemaker.

The University of Minnesota isolated uranium 235 in a prototype mass spectrometer.

The heart-lung machine was invented and used in the world's first successful open-heart surgery at in the University of Minnesota.

University of Minnesota was involved in the development of the “Black Box” flight recorder.

James “Crash” Ryan was not a racecar driver—he was the U of M engineer who created the first retractable, locking automobile seat belts.

A new process to produce ethylene for anti-freeze, plastics, and packaging has been developed by the University. If adopted by industry, the process could save industry billions annually.

When Walter Library was built in 1923, its cost was the most the legislature had approved for the construction of any public building except the state capitol building itself.

The “ectascope” is an assembly of lenses and mirrors that funnels natural light to the bottom floor of the Civil Engineering building. The bottom is 110 ft. below the surface.

The Electrical Engineering/Computer Science building is the largest academic building on campus.

A process invented at the U of M is used on nylon to give that fiber its permanent shape.

The kidney transplant program here is one of the largest in the world—in part because of a device developed at the U that keeps the organ viable during transportation.

A piece of standard operating-room equipment to monitor the concentration of anesthetic vapors in a patient's lungs had its beginning back in 1950 in the U of M lab of physics professor Alfred O. C. Nier.

The U of M is home to Alpha Sigma Kappa, the first sorority in America for women in technical studies.

The U of M has a total of three telescopes. The telescope atop the Tate Lab of Physics has been on campus since 1896. The University owns another telescope, which is located near Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota, and shares ownership of a third telescope, located on Mt. Lemmon in Arizona, with the University of Arizona.

At least 25,000 people today wear an implantable and refillable drug pump because of the 1970s work of U of M med student Perry J. Blackshear and a team of IT mechanical engineers.

Melvin Calvin, a 1935 graduate of the U of M's chemistry school, won the Nobel Prize for his work in photosynthesis.

Seymour Cray, the father of the supercomputer, graduated from the U's electrical engineering department in 1949.

The commander of the Apollo-Soyuz Space Mission was a man named Donald K. Slayton. He was known as Deke when he graduated from the U of M's School of Aeronautical Engineering in 1949.

A 1933 U of M aeronautical engineering graduate named Walter Spivak was involved in the design of the B-25 bomber, the P-51 propeller driven, the F-86 jet fighter, and the supersonic XB-70, among others.

That rock that looks like a chair between Pillsbury and Williamson Hall was brought here in 1872 by the founder of the geology department, Horace Winchell.