Columbia Ideas and Innovations Changed the World

Like its Ivy League peers, Columbia started out as a sleepy institution focused on teaching history and literature to undergraduates — a model of higher education typical of eighteenth-century colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. But its location in New York City, the future industrial hub of America, soon pushed it to broaden its mission. In the early years of the republic, when the city needed physicians, lawyers, and other professionals to serve its rapidly growing population, Columbia expanded its curricula to train them. When, at the dawn of the industrial era, the US needed engineers to build the infrastructure for a modern economy — from bridges and railways to aqueducts and factories — the University established one of the country's first engineering schools. And when sanitation, infectious disease, labor conditions, and ethnic tensions became defining challenges for cities nationwide, Columbia launched new graduate programs in areas like political science, journalism, public health, and social work.

By the turn of the twentieth century, most Americans’ lives had already been improved in one way or another by Columbians’ ingenuity and idealism. DeWitt Clinton 1786CC, 1826HON, as governor of New York, was the driving force behind the Erie Canal, which opened the interior of the country to trade. Horatio Allen 1823CC, a Columbia-trained engineer, helped to create the nation’s railways, and William Barclay Parsons 1879CC, 1882SEAS, a fellow engineer, designed the original New York City subway system, to name just a few examples.

But even as Columbia alumni were shaping the nation’s infrastructure and public institutions, something even more transformative was happening on campus. As sociology professor and former provost Jonathan R. Cole ’64CC, ’69GSAS writes in his 2009 book The Great American University, Columbia was becoming a new kind of institution — one that didn’t just impart knowledge but generated it. To meet America’s growing demand for scientific, technical, and policy expertise, Columbia and a handful of other US universities began to integrate research into the fabric of their institutions like no schools had ever done before.

The nature of the research they were supporting was distinct too. Whereas the German universities that had until then overseen the world’s most accomplished research programs prioritized theoretical science at the expense of more practical inquiries, Columbia and its US peers pursued a mix of so-called pure science and applied research that aimed to solve real-world problems. So while graduate students at the University of Berlin in 1910 were refining chemical principles and pontificating about Max Weber’s sociological theories, their counterparts at Columbia were just as likely to be testing drinking water and gathering evidence about the living conditions in Lower East Side tenements.

This new American model of higher education would by the mid-twentieth century emerge as the world’s dominant system for producing all types of scientific research. After helping to secure the Allied victory in World War II with breakthroughs like radar, antibiotics, and the atomic bomb, science was newly recognized as a source of national power, and Washington quickly moved to solidify America’s advantage by establishing a permanent system to fund it. From that point onward, the lion’s share of US medical, scientific, engineering, and social-science research would be conducted not at government-run facilities but on university campuses, financially supported by a constellation of federal agencies. The reasoning, Cole writes, was simple: scientists working independently were most likely to generate the novel ideas that would keep Americans safe, drive economic growth, and improve lives around the world.

Over the past century, Columbia has consistently ranked among the top US universities in scientific productivity. In the past five years alone, nearly two thousand inventions have emerged from Columbia’s labs, fueling the nation’s information-based economy. Columbia’s research priorities are always evolving, shaped by the challenges and tools of each era. But the biggest breakthroughs have stood the test of time and only seem more important with each passing year. What could be next? 

1. FM Radio

In the golden age of radio, listeners could often expect to hear one thing, no matter where they turned the dial: static. That’s because AM (amplitude modulation) transmission, the reigning technology in the early twentieth century, was highly sensitive to electrical interference from thunderstorms, household appliances, and even the sun. Experts insisted that nothing could be done. Weak, noisy reception, they said, was simply the nature of broadcasting.

Edwin Armstrong 1913SEAS, 1929HON, a Columbia professor of electrical engineering, proved them wrong by dreaming up an entirely different way of encoding sound in electromagnetic waves. Instead of adjusting the height of each wave, which is how AM transmission worked, he found a way to transmit sound by varying the frequency of the waves, or how tightly packed they were. Frequency modulation, or FM, proved to be almost entirely impervious to environmental disturbances, improving sound quality a hundredfold or more.

Armstrong’s FM system, patented in 1933, went on to dominate the airwaves. Other inventions of his, like the superheterodyne receiver, influenced the development of nearly all modern wireless technologies.

2. Reliable internet calls and video

Nearly every internet-connected product on the market today owes something to computational advances from Columbia researchers. Smartphone calls, as well as Zoom and FaceTime video chats, run on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which is powered by algorithms developed by Columbia computer scientist Henning Schulzrinne. High-quality video streaming, meanwhile, is dependent on MPEG-2 and AVC/H.274 compression standards that Columbia electrical engineer Dimitris Anastassiou helped to develop. And if you’re worried about hackers, you’re likely already benefiting from digital safeguards inspired by the work of Columbia computer scientist Salvatore Stolfo, whose work in intrusion detection helped to lay the foundation for security systems built into countless connected devices.

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