12 Things Pennsylvania Gave America That the Other 49 States Forget

Think you can name what Pennsylvania handed the rest of the country?

Cheesesteaks and the Liberty Bell won’t get you far.

The real list runs through a burger counter in Fayette County, a bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon, and a lab in Oakland that ended a childhood terror.

These are the things Pennsylvania gave the U.S. that the rest of Americans take for granted.

1. Big Mac

Pennsylvania invented the sandwich that pays for McDonald’s, and it happened in Fayette County.

Jim Delligatti ran a McDonald’s franchise in Uniontown, watched steelworkers walk in hungry, and decided the standard hamburger wasn’t going to hold them.

Two patties. Three buns.

He put it on his menu in April 1967 at 45 cents, and corporate spent months resisting the idea before the rest of the country got a taste.

Now it’s the burger every economist uses to compare currencies, and almost nobody outside Pennsylvania knows a Uniontown franchisee dreamed it up.

2. Oil Industry

Everything you associate with Texas started in a Pennsylvania creek bed.

Edwin Drake drilled along Oil Creek outside Titusville and struck oil at 69½ feet on August 27, 1859.

That’s it. That’s the whole beginning.

Venango County turned into a boomtown circus almost overnight, and the American petroleum industry took its first breath in a valley most drivers now pass on the way to Erie.

Spindletop got the movies. Titusville got the well.

3. First Computer

Pennsylvania built the machine every laptop descends from, and the Army paid for it.

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in February 1946, and it cost $487,000 to build.

Its job was calculating artillery shell trajectories.

Six women programmed it, and for years the credit went to the men whose names were stamped on the machine.

Silicon Valley gets the origin story. Philadelphia did the work.

4. Polio Vaccine

Pennsylvania ended the disease that emptied American swimming pools every summer.

Jonas Salk did the work at the University of Pittsburgh, and the vaccine was declared safe and effective on April 12, 1955.

Parents who had spent every summer terrified of a public swimming pool finally exhaled.

Salk refused to patent it, and when Edward R. Murrow asked who owned the vaccine, he said the people did.

Ask a room of Americans where the polio vaccine came from and watch how many say Pittsburgh.

5. Banana Split

Latrobe gave America the banana split, and it took an apprentice pharmacist to do it.

David Strickler worked the soda fountain at Tassel Pharmacy, split a banana lengthwise in 1904, and laid three scoops of ice cream down the middle.

Ohio still argues about this.

Pennsylvania settled it with a state historical marker in downtown Latrobe, which is about as official as a sundae fight gets.

Latrobe throws a banana split festival every summer, and half the state drives right past it on the way to Pittsburgh.

6. Slinky

Pennsylvania's most famous toy started as a dropped spring on a battleship project.

Richard James, a naval engineer working in Haverford Township, knocked a tension spring off a shelf in 1943 and watched it walk itself down onto the floor.

His wife Betty named it.

She also ran the company after Richard left, moved it home to Hollidaysburg in Blair County, and turned a wobbling coil of steel into an American shelf staple.

They're still made there, in the same town, on machines that press the coils one at a time.

7. Little League Baseball

Every kid in America who ever wore a jersey with a hardware store on the back owes Williamsport a thank-you.

Carl Stotz was a lumberyard clerk who wanted his nephews to have a game with grown-up rules, so he measured the base paths down to a size a 10-year-old could run.

The first game ran on June 6, 1939.

Three teams. Local sponsors.

Now the World Series lands in Williamsport every August, and Pennsylvania hosts the whole planet on fields Carl Stotz paced off himself.

8. Movie Theater

Pennsylvania invented the idea of paying a nickel to sit in the dark and watch a story.

Harry Davis and John P. Harris opened the Nickelodeon on Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh on June 19, 1905, and charged a nickel at the door.

Day one drew 450 people.

By the second day, more than 1,500 people were standing in line on the sidewalk, which is the moment the movie business figured out what it had.

Hollywood was still orange groves.

9. Commercial Radio

Pennsylvania put the first commercially licensed voice on the American airwaves, and it did it with election results.

KDKA, the Westinghouse station in Pittsburgh, broadcast the Harding-Cox returns from a rooftop shack in East Pittsburgh on November 2, 1920.

Hardly anyone owned a receiver yet, so people crowded around the few sets in town to hear a man read numbers out loud.

That was the whole show.

Every drive-time host, every ball game on the car radio, every station your father yelled at on I-76 starts on that rooftop.

10. Bubble Gum

Pennsylvania is the reason bubble gum is pink, and the reason is boring in the best possible way.

Walter Diemer kept an accountant's job at the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia and messed with gum recipes on the side, which is how he stumbled onto a batch that stretched instead of tearing.

The first batch came out gray.

Pink was the only food coloring sitting in the factory that day, so pink is what the world has chewed ever since.

An accountant in Philadelphia picked the color of childhood, and he did it because that was the jug within reach.

11. Smiley Face

Pennsylvania invented the emoticon, which means Pennsylvania is responsible for every text your kids have ever sent you.

Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, got tired of watching people read his jokes on a campus message board as insults.

So he proposed a fix at 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982: A colon, a hyphen, and a close parenthesis.

Mark the jokes, he wrote.

Every emoji on your phone, all several thousand of them, is a great-grandchild of three keystrokes typed in Oakland before lunch.

12. American Hospital

Before Pennsylvania, a sick American with no money had a church basement and a prayer.

Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond founded Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia in 1751, and it's still the nation's first.

Franklin talked the legislature into half the money, then dared Philadelphia's wealthy to match it.

They matched it.