TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1950s) Innovations & Breakthroughs </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1950s Highlights </history> <link 07806> <link 07582> <link 00127><link 00132><link 00125><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Innovations & Breakthroughs </hdr> <body> [The 1950s sometimes seem very near in time, sometimes very far away. Our national style of life was forged in the years after World War II, and many of the comforts and conveniences we take for granted today were already a part of everyday life by then. But many were not. Picture life without high-speed freeways; without jet travel; without--dare we suggest?--rock'n'roll. At the beginning of the decade, these things were still unimagined for most people. Following is a selection from among the discoveries, the breakthroughs, the achievements of the 1950s, as chronicled then in the pages of TIME.] (November 19, 1951) An elderly housewife with a large cancer in her gullet was wheeled into a basement room in the London, Ont. Victoria Hospital last week. A big lead-cased machine, like an up-ended cement mixer, was swung into position over her. There was a hissing of air ducts; a small window in the big machine opened for a few minutes, then snapped shut. The patient had received one of the first series of treatments by the first "Cobalt Bomb," medical science's newest weapon against cancer. The cobalt bomb was developed by Canadian atomic scientists and is the strongest radioactive source ever used for a peacetime purpose in any country. (December 22, 1952) Most U.S. cities, growing up haphazardly from cowpath to Main Street, needed 100 years or more before their population reached the 60,000 mark. But in Bucks County, Pa., a new city for 60,000 people is rising dramatically from 5,000 acres that were wood lots and farmland less than a year ago. By 1954's end, if all goes according to plan, Levittown, Pa., will be a complete community. Details from the blueprint of the new city: -- "Eight master blocks," each covering about 1 sq. mi. and having at its center a school, churches, recreation area and swimming pool. -- Three or four "neighborhoods" of 400 to 600 families within each master block. -- Segregated areas for business and light industry. -- A main shopping center (55 acres) conveniently located near the downtown business district. -- No parks just for sitting (the Levitts found on Long Island that people prefer to sit in their own yards, want parks for swimming, sports, etc.), but plenty of recreational grounds and athletic fields. The Levitts' standard house (two bedrooms, a study-bedroom, bath, kitchen, living room, carport with storage space) will sell for $10,500. For those who can pay more, there will be a bigger house priced up to $18,000. (May 18, 1953) Nothing has been dearer to the surgeon's heart than the dream of a machine to replace the heart--by pumping a patient's blood during an operation. To be thoroughly effective, it must also do the work of the lungs and oxygenate the blood. Only with such equipment could the surgeon perform delicate operations with the heart in his hand, in full view, and with no blood flowing through it. Last week Philadelphia's Dr. John H. Gibbon Jr. made the dream a reality. At Philadelphia's Jefferson Hospital, Cecelia Bavolek was anesthetized and Dr. Gibbon with two assisting surgeons, laid bare her heart. They opened the two large veins carrying blood to it, and slipped in plastic tubes which drained the blood away to the artificial heart-lung. Cecelia and the machine were hooked together for 45 minutes. For 26 of those minutes the machine breathed for her and pumped her blood. In that time, Dr. Gibbon lifted up her heart and opened it so that the aperture (as big as a half-dollar) between the auricles was in full view. He stitched that up with relative ease since he was working in a bloodless "dry field," although Cecelia's heart kept beating because its muscle was getting a full blood supply. Even more important, so was her brain. (June 8, 1953) Expectant and exulting, all Britain waited for the crowning to begin. This was pleasure anticipated and known. But 4,000 miles away, in the silence of the Himalayas, a little band of Britons fought time and the uncertain elements to conquer for their Queen earth's highest spire. It was 20 below zero and the air was thin enough to set the blood aboil as a New Zealand beekeeper-mountaineer named E.P. Hillary and an experienced Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norkey, struggled out of Camp 8 toward Everest's naked summit (29,002 ft.). Twice their climbing companions had been driven back by blizzards of ice, as had all men who tried before them. This time the mountain yielded. On Friday, May 29, 1953, Hillary planted the Union Jack on the highest spot on earth. Alongside, he raised the U.N. flag, and the banner of Nepal, in whose territory Everest stands. Runners bore the joyful tidings to the monastery at Namche Bazar. The message flashed to London. On coronation eve, they waked the Queen to tell her. (May 17, 1954) In the train from London to Oxford last week, Roger Bannister was not at all sure that he wanted to run that day. It was raining and the wind was stiff. Never mind the weather, urged Coach Stampfl: it might actually challenge him to greater effort. At Oxford's rural Iffley Road Track, Bannister wandered about, undecided. The weather was clearing slowly. Five minutes before the start of the annual Oxford v. British A.A.A. mile race, he decided to make his all-out attempt. With two of Bannister's running mates, fellow A.A.A. Runners Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, Trainer Stampfl had carefully worked out a plan. In the race, the plan worked perfectly. After a false start (Bannister held firm), Brasher dashed off into the lead. "Faster! Faster!" shouted Banister at the 220-yd. mark. At the 440-yd. mark, Bannister was clocked in a sizzling 57.5 behind Brasher's pace. At 660 yds., Coach Stampfl shouted from the track side: "Relax! Relax!" Bannister's long-legged loping stride never changed as he hit the halfway point in 1:58.2. Then, according to plan, Chataway sprinted into the lead, Bannister right at his heels. Some 300 yds. from the finish, Bannister began pouring it on, lengthening his stride for his famed finishing kick, his head rolled back, his neck painfully arched. He tore the tape and collapsed unconscious into the arms of Trainer Stampfl. "I wasn't thinking about anything in particular," he said afterward. "I saw the tape faintly ahead, put everything into getting there and that was the last I knew about it." Over the loudspeakers came the meticulous voice of the announcer: "...A time which is a new meeting and track record, and which, subject to ratification, will be a new English native, a British national, a British all comers, European, British Empire and world record. The time was three..." At that point, the 1,500 track fans in the stands broke into such an uproar that the rest of the announcement was lost: "Three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths seconds." (October 25, 1954) The first fully transistorized radio was claimed this week by Regency, a division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates. It is not quite the wristwatch radio of the comics, but it is only a small pocketful (3 by 5 by 1 1/4 in.), and it makes loud music on a single hearing-aid battery. Inside, instead of vacuum tubes, it has four transistors. The chief advantage of transistors--besides their smallness--is that they have no glowing filament and therefore need no "A current" to keep the filament hot. All they need is the "B current," and very little of that. According to Edward C. Tudor, president of I.D.E.A., the 22 1/2-volt B battery (cost: $1.15) lasts 20 to 30 hours if used continuously, longer when played intermittently. (September 12, 1955) As the fall selling season opened this week, the biggest news among retailers is s-t-r-e-t-c-h y-a-r-n, a yarn about as elastic as rubber. Tried out for men's socks with hardly a whisper of publicity three years ago, and even opposed by many retailers, the longwearing elastic-stretch socks developed their own customers. They captured nearly 70% of the market in New York City and 25% across the nation, sent textile men scrambling to turn out dozens of new stretch-yarn products. In both Northern and Southern knitting mills, looms are now weaving stretch yarn into men's briefs, women's girdles, T shirts, gloves, bandages, figure-tight bathing suits, swing-free golf shirts, skin-tight dancer's leotards, baby rompers that will grow with the infant, and long-wearing panties that will fit any girl between two and eight. (February 27, 1956) The nation's 1,000,000 or more diabetics, often disappointed in their hopes for a pill to free them from insulin injections, heard good new last week. Doctors in 50 medical centers are trying out two drugs developed in Germany, and first reports are that they may succeed in regulating the blood sugar in about 80% of diabetes victims--mostly adults with a relatively mild and stable form of the disease. (March 26, 1956) Bell Telephone Laboratories told last week about a large-capacity electronic computer whose essential works occupy only three cubic feet of space instead of a good-sized room. The reduction of size is due to the replacement of bulky vacuum tubes by 800 tiny transistors and 11,000 germanium diodes. All of them together need only 100 watts of current, less than one-twentieth of the power required by a comparable vacuum-tube computer. (July 9, 1956) The biggest public works program since the Pharaohs piled up the Pyramids will help the economy for another generation. Before the signature of President Eisenhower was dry on the highway construction bill, Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks announced the allocation to the states of $1,125,000,000 in federal funds for the first year. The Associated General Contractors predicated that $100 million in construction contracts will be let by state highway departments within the next two months. Another $300 million in contracts is expected before the year is out. The bill, which raised taxes on gasoline a penny a gallon and increased taxes on tires and trucks, initially calls for federal-state highway spending of $33.5 billion over 13 years. Additional related construction will push the final total closer to $100 billion. Said Michael Paulson, business manager of the General Contractors Association: "This will mushroom into the greatest volume of construction our nation has ever experienced. The industry is on the brink of another decade of prosperity. (October 29, 1956) Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, slim in a royal blue coat and ermine-trimmed hat, stood under a white nylon canopy in gale-swept northern England. "All of us here," she said in her girlish voice, "know we are present at the making of history...It is with pride that I open Calder Hall, Britain's first atomic power station." She pulled a small lever, and unseen controls shifted in the brightly colored, futuristic structures behind the nylon canopy. The hand of a clocklike dial turned, measuring the flow of atom-born electricity into Britain's power lines. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have experimental plants that produce small amounts of nuclear electricity, but Britain is the first to achieve atomic power on a serious scale. When in full operation, Calder Hall's two units will generate 92,000 kw. The most advanced nuclear power plant in the U.S. at Shippingport, Pa., has only the rough, non-nuclear parts of its equipment in place. Paid for chiefly with government money, it is not scheduled for completion until next summer. Many private atomic power plants have been projected with loud publicity, but few, if any, have passed the ceremonial groundbreaking stage. The site of Consolidated Edison Co. of New York's plant in Indian Point on the Hudson, for instance, has not even been cleared of trees. (December 3, 1956) If one beam of light can be transmitted along a glass tube, why not transmit detailed images along the same path? The problem has steadily resisted the best efforts of optical researchers. But now the University of Rochester's Indian-born Dr. Narinder Singh Kapany, 30, has succeeded by applying a technique he refers to as "fiber optics." With his new method, said Dr. Kapany last week, he has already designed a glass "gastroscope" which can be snaked down the throat for a detailed closeup view of the human stomach. Fiber optics derives its name from its use of hair-thin strands of optical glass as light carriers. Light entering an ordinary clear glass or plastic rod is reflected over and over again from the inner surface until it emerges again at the far end. This familiar principle causes the rod to act as a "light pipe." Dr. Kapany conceived the idea of bunching thousands of microscopic glass rods, each of which would transmit a single point of light. The bundle of points of light should form an image in much the same way the pattern of ink dots in a newspaper illustration forms a picture. The experiments suggested a number of practical applications of the fiber-optics principle. Used in medical instruments, the fiber bundles would permit doctors to examine and even photograph internal areas beyond the range of existing instruments. (March 11, 1957) In Beverly Hills a woman patient asked her doctor for a prescription for a popular tranquilizing drug. The pills, she explained, were for her daughter who needed them to get through the trying first week of her honeymoon. In Boston a sunburned blonde asked her druggist for a bottle of "happiness pills." Said she, "I just got back from Florida, and everybody down there gets them." From the mental hospitals, where reserpine and derivatives of chlorpromazine provided one of the century's great breakthroughs in psychiatry, the use of the tranquilizers has spread to masses of mine-run neurotics and other people vexed with problems and pressures. For a time, when most states permitted an unlimited number of refills for tranquilizer prescriptions, Equanil and Miltown (trade names for meprobamate) were the hottest items in many a big-city pharmacy. The situation became so alarming that states are tightening regulations, putting tranquilizers on the same non-refillable prescription basis as barbiturates. (May 6, 1957) Some of the most hush-hush medical research has been pursued in dozens of laboratories in the effort to find a contraceptive pill. Last week, after months of rumors, President John Searle of Chicago drug manufacturers G.D. Searle & Co. guardedly told stockholders that the company "hopes to introduce...an item this year for a variety of menstrual disorders...There has been speculation that the drug may have a use in the field of physiological birth control." But its safety and effectiveness in that field have not been fully tested, are far from certain. The possibility of "fertility control" arises from the fact that the drug, when taken on certain schedules, apparently prevents ovulation. Since no ovum is then released, there is technically no destruction to life. Studies of the hormone's action on this phase of the cycle are far from complete. Even when the drug is released by the FDA, it will be strictly a prescription item; its effects are so tricky and complicated--there may be dangers still unsuspected--that women will be sharply discouraged from trying to doctor themselves with it. (July 29, 1957) Last week, as Disneyland celebrated its second birthday, Walt Disney was indeed the world's biggest boy with the world's biggest toy. By bus, car and helicopter, on anniversary day close to 25,000 visitors trooped to his 60-acre playground at Anaheim, 23 miles south of Los Angeles--and emptied their pockets to see how it worked. The average visitor plunked down $2.72 for rides and admission, $2 for food, another 18 cents for souvenirs--Disneyland pennants, maps, Donald Duck caps, etc. All told this year, with attendance running 11% ahead of 1956, the turnstiles will clink 4,500,000 times. Disneyland will gross more than $11 million and into Disney's treasure house will flow a Dumbo-sized profit after taxes of more than $1,000,000. (November 25, 1957) In the little (pop. 600) town of Shippingport, Pa. this week, a man in a white protective suit will step alone into the spotless puzzle box of the world's most powerful atomic reactor. After he shuts twelve one-ton doors and gives the final signal, giant control rods will lift slowly out of the uranium reactor core to start a sustained chain reaction. At the moment the reactor "goes critical," a flow of 508 degrees F. water will pass through the core chamber, starting a nuclear process that eventually will produce steam to generate electric power. Shippingport will be the first U.S. reactor to produce commercially on more than an experimental scale. (September 22, 1958) While oil companies, hotels and airlines started their own credit cards years ago, the fast-growing new market for a broad new type of card was pioneered in 1950 when Lawyer Ralph E. Schneider, 49, Hollywood and Broadway Producer Alfred Bloomingdale, 42, and the late Frank X. McNamara founded Diners' Club. They built up a roster of 17,000 restaurants, hotels, motels and specialty shops that were to pay them a 7% fee for the business of their 750,000 members. Diners' had no serious competition until old, bold American Express three months ago dealt itself into the card game, enlisted the aid of its worldwide contacts to drum up members. Through banks, American Express mailed applications to 8,000,000 depositors--people who obviously have some money to spend. President Ralph T. Reed also sent personal letters to 22,000 corporation presidents. More than 300 American Expressmen started knocking on doors of executive suites all round the U.S. to sell the credit card (charge: $6 per year for initial card, $3 for other members of the same firm). (October 20, 1958) Success has finally arrived for 63-year-old Buckminster ("Bucky") Fuller. His geodesic domes are popping up like mushrooms all over the surface of the globe. Essence of the geodesic dome is to frame a sphere (the greatest possible space with the least possible surface) with combinations of tetrahedrons ("the simplest finite system you can have"), making a lightweight, easily assembled structure of wide span and low cost. (October 27, 1958) In front of mammoth Hangar 10 at Washington's National Airport last week, the First Lady of the U.S. smashed a bottle of water from the seven seas on the fuselage of a Pan American Boeing 707--and officially ushered the U.S. into the commercial jet age. With water still dripping from a steel plate installed to protect it from Mamie Eisenhower's blow, the newly christened jet clipper America was pulled out onto the apron while 6,000 guests looked on. (November 24, 1958) Turin's Valentino Exhibition Palace was ablaze with chrome and bright-painted metal. On view at Italy's oldest and biggest auto show were the pride and joy of the world's automakers. But the stars of the show were not the big, the swift or the beautiful. They were the small, neatly styled economy cars that spark the biggest boom Europe's automakers have ever known. This year the industry will produce better than 4,500,000 small cars--and export something like 45% of them to eager customers in every corner of the globe. Even Japan is hustling to get into the race. Though the industry produced only 42,597 passenger cars last year, automakers plan big things. Toyota Motor Co., which makes a sturdy Toyopet sedan (30 miles per gal.) for $2,222, has shipped 800 cars so far this year, including 150 to Hawaii. Japan's other major producer, Nissan Motor Co., with a smaller Datsun sedan (40 miles per gal.) for $1,762, has sent out another 800 to Hawaii and the West Coast. The reception was so enthusiastic that the two companies see a U.S. market of 500 cars a month next year. (December 8, 1958) The first detailed description of the belt of lethal radiation that swathes the earth was given last week by Dr. James A. Van Allen of the State University of Iowa. Often called the "Van Allen radiation," the belt was discovered by the instruments that the Army's satellites carried into space. The belt, Scientist Van Allen told the American Physical Society at Chicago, seems to be a great doughnut made chiefly of fast-moving electrons and protons circulating around the earth on both sides of its magnetic equator. (February 16, 1959) "Now everyone gets the best seat in the house," says Conductor Erich Leinsdorf. "That is proper for a democracy, is it not?" The "best seat" is a living room sofa facing a wall equipped with two speakers six to eight feet apart. If listener and speakers are positioned correctly there seems to issue from the wall a wave of what is known as stereophonic sound. Nothing has so excited listeners and record makers since, more than a decade ago, the long-playing disk ushered in the Age of High Fidelity. Sterophony's extra clarity and depth have not had the immediate impact on the public that high-fidelity sound did, but is a major and startling improvement in home listening. (May 4, 1959) Not since Henry Ford put the nation on wheels with his model T has such a great and sweeping change hit the auto industry. Out from Detroit and into 7,200 Chevrolet showrooms this week rolled the radically designed Corvair, first of the Big Three's new generation of compact cars. Smaller and simpler than Detroit's chromespun standards, the Corvair is like no other model ever mass-produced in the U.S.; its engine is made of aluminum and cooled by air, and it is mounted in the rear. </body> </article> </text>