Western Pennsylvania has a reputation now as a place where innovators are working on everything from cancer research to self-driving cars.

And it has always been on the cutting edge, giving the world major advances in everything from industry to medicine to entertainment. Ideas that changed the way we live today came from figures like John Roebling and William “Uncle Billy” Smith (both of whom are covered elsewhere in this edition), as well as countless others.

Here is a look at just a few of the inventions developed or perfected in the region.

It's probably not a surprise this list starts with an invention that would create a product synonymous with the area for more than 100 years and still is produced locally today — steel.

In the 1850s, the Industrial Revolution was changing Western Europe and the United States, as mass production, steam engines and long-distance communication all were introduced and expanded their reach. One issue holding back some industry, particularly railroads, was the quality of metal at the time.

The two main options at the time were cast and wrought iron, and both had major drawbacks when it came to strength and resistance to shock.

Then, English inventor Sir Henry Bessemer developed the process that bears his name in the early 1850s.

The process blows air through molten iron, which causes impurities in the iron to oxidize out of the mixture, leaving behind a purer, stronger substance that came to be known as Bessemer steel. It was much more resilient to bending and shock than other iron and made a better material for the rails that railroads were laying around the world.

By the early 1860s, American engineer Alexander Lyman Holley had further developed the Bessemer process and helped open the first U.S. steel mill, in Troy, N.Y., in 1867. That mill spawned a company that built more mills, which attracted the attention of Andrew Carnegie, who had made a small fortune in the railroad and the early Pennsylvania oil industry.

Carnegie owned a bridge company and thought steel production would be a useful addition. In 1875, the Edgar Thompson Works in Braddock, Allegheny County, opened.

It was a step toward making Carnegie a large fortune.

Over the next 25 years, Carnegie would build a steel empire. By 1901, when he sold his company to J.P. Morgan's newly created U.S. Steel Corporation, his share in it was worth the modern equivalent of more than $8 billion.

Not long after Carnegie retired from steel, another set of entrepreneurs in Pittsburgh had a prescient idea.

In the 1890s, Thomas Edison had patented the first motion picture cameras, as well as a peephole style viewer to watch the films. Such viewers had a big drawback — only one person could watch at a time.

It wasn't long before more modern projectors were available, meaning motion pictures were no longer a solitary entertainment. The first movie theaters were just theaters that sometimes showed motion pictures and sometimes live entertainment.

But in 1905, on Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh, John P. Harris and his brother-in-law, Harry Davis, opened a nickelodeon, what historians think was the first business dedicated to showing motion pictures.

Harris' father was a vaudeville promoter and Harris had been responsible for the first movie screening in the city, in 1897.

The name wasn't novel — a museum owner in Boston used it, combining the admission price of a nickel with the ancient Greek word for a theater. Davis and Harris popularized it, though, as well as the concept.

But just two years after the Pittsburgh theater opened, Louis B. Mayer, the man who would cofound MGM Studios in 1924, had opened his first nickelodeon in Massachusetts.

By the next year there were perhaps 8,000 such theaters nationwide, according to the Theatre Historical Society of America.

But the local nickelodeon didn't last. By 1910, Davis and Harris' establishment had been torn down and replaced with a larger space.

The 15 to 20 minutes of short films the nickelodeons offered were soon replaced by feature-length films, then by movies with sound. As movies got longer, theaters got larger and more comfortable, replacing nickelodeons with a more modern style of movie theater.

Starting with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s, inventors spent decades trying to increase the distance over which people could communicate.

Alexander Graham Bell's development of the telephone made it possible for any two people to talk with each other — no training in Morse code needed — as long as both of them had access to a phone. That, of course, required wires, just like the telegraph.

Italian inventor Gugliermo Marconi thought he could free communication from wires, and in 1895, he did just that, transmitting electrical signals wirelessly from a telegraph transmitter to a receiver to be decoded.

The drawback was the transmitters available at the time produced radio signals when a spark passed between two conductors, meaning they could only produce the on-and-off pulses for Morse code and couldn't transmit audio signals.

The development of a new kind of transmitter in the early decades of the 20th century made it possible to transmit sound for the first time. One of the pioneers in that field was Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Corporation, based in Pittsburgh.

The company had done radio research as part of government contracts during World War I, and once the war was over, some engineers there turned their attention to a civilian application for the new technology.

One such engineer — Frank Conrad — became well-known among other radio enthusiasts in the area for his personal broadcasts of music and other entertainment.

Publicity around those concerts prompted some of the bosses at Westinghouse to launch a radio station in time for the Nov. 2, 1920, presidential election. An experimental station in New York City had broadcast the first spoken word election report four years earlier, in 1916.

But this wasn't going to be a one-off broadcast. The idea was to create regular radio programming as a way to convince consumers to buy a radio, still a very, very new technology. And, of course, Westinghouse would be building radios they could listen on, in addition to making the programming.

By the end of December 1920, KDKA was on the air daily, and started notching “firsts,” including the first baseball and football games broadcast in 1921 and the first radio appearance by Will Rogers in 1922.

The original model of using radio receiver sales to fund programming didn't last, and by the late 1920s, KDKA was a truly commercial radio station, establishing the basic model the station — along with hundreds of others nationwide — follows to today.

The birth of the Bantam Jeep is a Butler legend, and rightly so. In 1940, when the American Bantam Car Company decided to submit a prototype for a U.S. Army vehicle test, it was only a few years old and had mostly made economy cars.

From the moment cars were produced, people saw their usefulness in war. By the late 1930s, developments in Europe showed U.S. Army officials the need for a small, lightweight vehicle with four-wheel-drive for troops. Larger trucks were good for supplies but would get stuck off road, and soldiers needed to get around quickly.

In 1940, the U.S. Army Quartermaster put out a call for prototypes, but with a catch — the deadline was 49 days away. As it happened, American Bantam had employees who believed in the concept, and, against all odds, the tiny company was the only one to deliver a prototype for the test.

Not only did they deliver it, but the light, versatile, rugged Bantam Reconnaissance Car withstood 30 days of Army testing and showed how useful it would be. The company would refine the vehicle and build almost 2,700, but in 1942, the U.S. Army, concerned that American Bantam wouldn't be able to make 75 Jeeps a day, awarded contracts to Willys-Overland and to Ford.

Ford and Willys would produce more than 600,000 Jeeps during the war, but American Bantam's contribution to the war didn't end with the few thousand it made.

In addition to parts for torpedoes, the company built 75,000 1/4-ton cargo trailers specifically designed to track behind the Jeep. It would continue producing the trailers until the company was bought out in 1956.

The Jeep, meanwhile, would go on to achieve iconic status. After World War II, many farmers found the CJ, short for Civilian Jeep, was just as useful on their land as it had been for soldiers on the battlefield.

Jeep production would keep Willys alive for years, and the vehicle survived multiple corporate parents and evolved into a best-selling civilian SUV in the 21st Century.

For centuries, it was among the most feared of diseases. Polio, a viral infection that can cause muscle weakness, paralysis and even death, was highly contagious and extremely dangerous.

By the early 20th century, outbreaks were happening in the United States, Europe, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Perhaps the most famous person to have polio was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who contracted the disease in 1921 and was left paralyzed from the waist down. He was only able to stand with the help of leg braces and used a wheelchair, something he worked to conceal from the public.

By the 1940s and 1950s, polio was a public health emergency. In 1952, the U.S. had its deadliest outbreak of the virus. There were almost 58,000 cases reported, with 3,145 deaths and more than 21,000 left with some form of disability, ranging from weakened muscles to paralysis and even the inability to breathe on their own.

The next year, Dr. Jonas Salk, a physician and professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, tested the first inactivated polio vaccine — a vaccine made from a dead virus as opposed to one made from a weakened but live virus — on himself and his family.

In 1954, the tests expanded to include 1.6 million children in the U.S., Canada and Finland. On April 12, 1955 — 69 years ago this week — the results of that study were announced.

By 1957, there were 5,600 polio infections reported, down from almost 58,000 in 1952. By 1961 the number had dropped to under 200.

One reason for the fast drop was that Salk didn't patent the vaccine and shared it with multiple drugmakers.

Advances in medicine, including the development of an oral polio vaccine made using an attenuated virus, have made what was once a very common illness almost entirely eliminated. In 2021 there were six reported cases of wild poliovirus, according to the World Health Organization.