Ever since Pierre Laclede and his son, Auguste Chouteau, founded St. Louis in 1764, St. Louisans have devised ways to improve life and change the way we live with fresh ideas and innovations that spurred economic growth and paradigm shifts for people in all walks of life, all over the United States and the World.  Some of the more notable inventions and innovations with St. Louis origins are listed on this page. 

• An immigrant from Germany, Adam Lemp from 1838-1840 developed the first truly American beer, a lager, brewed in his grocery store, the site of which is now along the south wall of the Edward Jones Dome.  In the decades following, Adam Lemp built and perfected the art of production, aging and storage of his product in two different plants, the second, which we know today as “the Lemp Brewery,” used a natural cave refrigerated with ice from the Mississippi River for aging and storage.
  
  
• City surveyor Julius Pitzman laid out the first of his “private places,” Benton Place, near Lafayette Square in 1867.  Benton Place being the first, a private place is a gated, private subdivision in which the streets are owned by the homeowners, not the city.  The St. Louis area has more private places than any other city.
  
  
• Originally chosen in 1865 as the site for St. Louis’ waterworks, construction on the Chain of Rocks Water Filtration Plant began 22 years later in 1887.  “Finished” in 1894, improvements and expansions to the plant have been made constantly ever since including being the first water treatment facility to use lime softening and ferrous sulfate in the water purification process, now a standard practice.
  
  
• In an effort to feed elderly patients protein before dentures became common, an unknown doctor in the St. Louis area around 1890 came up with the idea of grinding peanuts, an ancient legume, into a form of butter.  In 1903, Dr. Ambrose Straub, another St. Louis physician, patented the peanut butter making machine, thus inventing a great American staple.
  
  
• Harry Hussmann was a great innovator.  In 1906, he solved the problem of keeping meat cold and Clarence Birdseye’s frozen vegetables frozen in a grocer with the invention of display and frozen cases.  In 1935, Hussmann Corporation introduced the first self-service display cases for meat, dairy and produce.
  
  
• In the 1920’s, the St. Louis Cardinals became one of baseball’s premier franchises thanks to the foresight of Branch Rickey.  Before even the mighty New York Yankees who could afford to pay the best players well, Rickey spearheaded the purchase of various level minor-league teams, and in some cases entire leagues, to be used as training and development incubators for young talent, a pipeline we now call “the farm system”.
  
  
• For a solid week in 1939, the street lamps in the City of St. Louis burned.  The sun was blocked out completely by dense, black smoke prevalent in the city due to the burning of soft Illinois coal as a fuel and heat source by residents.  In 1940, the nation’s first Domestic Smoke Control Ordinance was introduced and a hefty fine levied to anyone caught burning Illinois soft coal in the City of St. Louis.  In less than a year, the worst of the smoke dissipated and the Domestic Smoke Control Ordinance became the prototype law in the US for pollution reduction and control.

This is not the end or the limits of the story.  It is the tip of a very long list of inventions and innovations that changed the way we live.  Visit this page often as more innovations will be added.

If you know of an innovation or invention that originates in the St. Louis Region, please contact Susan Sampson, Innovate St. Louis, 314-444-1154 or e-mail susan@innovatestl.org.