There are some universities that don't require research, so if you want to only teach you can go to one of them. It's a solved problem. Anyway, the best universities require research, opting out of research so you get less money, less prestige, and not the top students.
Also, accumulating published papers is important to get a new position in the future, so only teaching is a risk for your future career.
For teaching some of the topics to advanced students, it's important to have people that do research and is updated with the cutting edge results. Also to babysit the graduate students so they can publish their results. For teaching the students in the first years, research is probably overrated.
There are many interesting result that fly under the radar. If you don't want to count big things like LIGO, my favorite to talk about is magnetoresitance, IIRC the giant one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance [It's not my specialization, so I may have a few details wrong.]
You can explain it to a technical friend.
Start explaining about the the two possible spin of electrons, and how it cause the existence of two currents inside a conductor. This is not important in a normal conductor like cooper, but it's important inside a magnetic conductor like iron. So yo get a different resistance for each one of the two currents, the one that has a spin that is in the same direction than the magnetic field and the other with the oposite spin.
You can make a sandwich of iron-cooper-iron. If there is no external magnetic field, the two iron parts have oposite magnetization and the total resistance is higher. If there is an external magnetic field, the two iron parts have the same magnetization and the total resistance is lower. Anyway, the difference is not too much.
[Ideally, your fiend should be boring now, uninterested about the abstract currents no one cares about.]
It get's more interesting if you have many layers of iron and cooper, because the difference is higher and they call is "giant". It is used in the heads to read hard disks, like in the laptop of your friend. [Your friend will never see it coming!]
It's interesting because it mix weird abstract quantum properties and engineering to make it more efficient and you get a device that everyone has. For some weird reason, no one talks about it. And the sad part is that SSD are killing the punch line of the story :( .
Also, accumulating published papers is important to get a new position in the future, so only teaching is a risk for your future career.
For teaching some of the topics to advanced students, it's important to have people that do research and is updated with the cutting edge results. Also to babysit the graduate students so they can publish their results. For teaching the students in the first years, research is probably overrated.