1947

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950

political events

A presidential message to Congress March 12 outlines the Truman Doctrine with plans to aid Greece, now embroiled in civil war between communists and royalists (see 1946), and Turkey; the president proposes economic (and military) aid to countries threatened by communist infiltration and asks Congress to appropriate $400 million in military aid to the eastern European nations whose democracies are jeopardized by what are now clearly expansionist policies on the part of Josef Stalin. If Stalin is not stopped, says Truman, he will go on to take Italy, France, and the rest of Western Europe.

President Truman announces March 21 a loyalty program, authorizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate persons with suspected communist connections.

The phrase cold war coined by presidential adviser Bernard Baruch, now 78, describes the hostility between the West and the Soviet Union. Speaking at the unveiling of his portrait at the South Carolina House of Representatives April 16, he says, "Let us not be deceived—we are today in the midst of a cold war."

The June issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists introduces what will be called the "Doomsday Clock." Asked by the magazine's cofounder Hyman Goldsmith to design the cover, artist Martyl Langsdorf (whose physicist husband worked on the Manhattan Project during the war) has created a symbol of nuclear danger, with the hands indicating 7 minutes to midnight (see 1949).

An article signed "X" in the July issue of Foreign Affairs magazine proposes a policy of "containment" toward the Soviet Union. The author is the new head of the State Department's policy planning staff George F. Kennan Jr., who helped set up the U.S. embassy at Moscow in 1943 (see 1946). Secretary of State Marshall and his successors will adopt the essentials of Kennan's policy (see Nitze, 1950).

A new Presidential Succession Act signed into law by President Truman July 18 provides that the vice president shall succeed to office in the event of the president's death, and should there be no vice president the office shall go to the speaker of the House. Next in line shall be the president pro tempore of the Senate, the secretary of state, the secretary of the treasury, and other cabinet officers, but the law says nothing about the possibility of the president becoming incapacitated (see Twenty-Fifth Amendment, 1967).

The National Security Act signed into law by President Truman July 26 provides for a National Military Establishment that will be renamed the Department of Defense in August 1949, replacing the War Department. A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) authorized by Congress July 26 in response to an order by Truman works to counter activities by Moscow, whose agents are pouring money into western Europe and attempting through local communist parties to establish governments. Amidst cold war tensions, the president has acted on the advice of Secretary of State Marshall and James V. (Vincent) Forrestal, 55, who is confirmed as the first secretary of defense September 17 and receives greater authority over the army, navy, and air force. A U.S. Air Force independent of the army or navy is established in September with Gen. Carl Spaatz as its chief of staff, but he will find administrative work uncongenial and retire next year. Formally launched September 18 as the successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under terms of the National Security Act, the CIA is to conduct global intelligence operations and prevent another Pearl Harbor (see Stimson, 1929).

Socialist Vincent Auriol, 62, becomes president of France January 16, Gen. de Gaulle assumes control of the nationwide Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) Party April 14, it emerges as the strongest group in the October municipal elections (the communists are second), many peasants refuse to deliver their grain after a poor harvest, strikes in November affect nearly 2 million workers, and a new cabinet takes office November 23 under Robert Schuman, 61.

Political geographer Sir Halford J. Mackinder dies at Parkstone, Dorset, March 6 at age 86, having argued that western Europe and the United States "constitute for many purposes a single community of nations" that can offset the power of the Eurasian heartland (see NATO, 1949); former German army officer Franz Epp has died in a U.S. internment camp January 31 at age 78.

Greece's George II dies April 1 at age 56 after a second reign of 12 years as civil war continues to wrack his country. He is succeeded by his 45-year-old brother, who will reign until 1964 as Paul I.

Denmark's Kristian X dies at Copenhagen April 20 at age 76 after a 35-year reign in whose latter years he has often ridden his horse through German-occupied Copenhagen's streets to demonstrate his refusal to give up sovereignty and was imprisoned from 1943 to 1945 for speaking out against the occupation forces. He is succeeded by his popular 48-year-old son, who was also imprisoned for encouraging the Danish resistance and will reign until 1972 as Frederik IX.

Hungarian communists seize power with backing from the Red Army in a coup d'état May 30 while Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy, 43, is on holiday in Switzerland. Hungary becomes a Soviet satellite (see 1956).

The Communist Information Bureau (Informatsionnoye Byuro Komunisticheskikh I Rabochikh) (Cominform) is founded in September at Góra, Poland, by the Communist parties of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Former Croat partisan leader Marshal (Josip Broz) Tito is the most ardent supporter of the bureau, and its headquarters are established at Belgrade (but see 1948).

Former White Russian general Anton I. Denikin dies of a heart attack at Ann Arbor, Mich., August 8 at age 74. He has lived in exile since 1920, first at Constantinople, then in France (where he hid during World War II), and since last year in America; former British general Sir Ian Hamilton dies at London October 12 at age 94; French general Philippe Leclerc dies at Colomb-Bechar, Algeria, November 28 at age 44 (he is celebrated as the liberator of Paris); former British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, 1st earl Baldwin of Bewdley, dies at Astley Hall, near Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire, December 14 at age 80; former Italian king Victor Emmanuel III at Alexandria December 28 at age 78.

Romania's Michael abdicates under communist pressure December 30 after a 7-year reign. The Romanian monarchy begun by Carol I in 1866 is ended and Romania becomes a communist state.

Arabs and Jews reject a final British proposal for division of Palestine into Arab and Jewish zones administered as a trusteeship February 7 (see 1946). Britain refers the question to the United Nations. British troops end their 6-year occupation of Iraq October 26 but retain two RAF bases (see 1948). The UN general assembly votes November 29 for partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem to be under a UN trusteeship; the Jews approve the plan, the Arabs reject it. Palestine has about 1 million Arabs and 650,000 Jews, many of whom have immigrated illegally to find sanctuary from European persecution. The Arab League announces December 17 that it will use force to resist partition, and raids begin against Jewish communities in the Holy Land (see Israel, 1948).

The Cheribon (Linggadjati) Agreement pledges Dutch and Indonesian authorities to settle any dispute by arbitration if they cannot resolve it by themselves and to cooperate in establishing a Netherlands-Indonesian Union to be formed no later than January 1, 1949, with the Dutch queen as its sovereign. Initiated late last year in western Java it is signed at Batavia (soon to be renamed Jakarta) March 25, but the two sides soon resume hostilities, Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir resigns under pressure in June, and the Dutch mount a "police action" against republican forces in July. The United Nations intervenes by creating a Good Offices Committee with members from Australia chosen by the republicans, from Belgium chosen by the Dutch, and from the United States selected by both (see Renville Agreement, 1948).

Burmese nationalist leader Bogyoke Aung San dies in the council chamber at Rangoon July 19 at age 32 while the council is in session when his political rival U Saw has him gunned down along with his brother and five ministers (see 1945). He has conferred early in the year at London with Clement Attlee and announced an agreement January 27 that provided for Burma's independence within a year; his AFPFL party has won 196 of 202 seats in the April election for a constitutional assembly, and although communists have denounced him as a "tool of British imperialism," he has supported a resolution for independence outside the British Commonwealth. U Saw was interned in Uganda during the war and will be executed for his role in the killings (see 1948).

Britain sets up Pakistan August 14 as an independent state bordering India to the west and east with her capital at Karachi. India gains independence from Britain August 15 and becomes a dominion following endorsement of a plan to partition the subcontinent by the Muslim League and the All-India Congress. Field marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, now 63, supervises the division of the Indian Army, and Jawaharlal Nehru, now 58, becomes first prime minister of Hindu India (see Gandhi, 1948; constitution, 1950); Pakistan names London-trained lawyer Mohammed Ali Jinnah, 71, of the Muslim League to be governor general. A cosmopolitan non-Islamist who wears European clothes, Jinnah drinks alcohol and is married to a Parsi woman; he is suspicious of the vain and self-serving British viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, now 47, who pretends to ignore the fact that his wife, Edwina, is sleeping with Nehru, but Jinnah is dying of tuberculosis. His sister Fatima, 53, serves as his hostess and is always at his side; she has opposed Conservative Orthodox attitudes and worked since 1934 for the social emancipation and welfare of women. Fatima Jinnah will become known as Madar-i-Millat ("Mother of the Country"), and Pakistan will remain a secular state despite efforts by Islamic extremists to take over her government. The former governor of Bengal Victor Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd earl of Lytton, dies at Knebworth, Hertfordshire, October 26 at age 71.

Kashmir's maharajah agonizes over whether to join Pakistan or remain with India (a Hindu, his people are mostly Muslim). A rebellion breaks out in Kashmir, Pakistan sends in troops, the maharajah signs an agreement in October to join India in exchange for military support, and the dispute over control of Kashmir is referred to the United Nations December 30 after millions have died in bloody riots following the partition, which has been ineptly handled. The departure of the British raj after nearly 2 centuries leaves the subcontinent in a troubled condition but with a legacy that includes a common language (for use, at least, in courts of law and many business transactions) and a superb railroad network (see 1948).

Former Japanese Imperial Navy chief of staff Adm. Osami Nagano dies at Tokyo January 5 at age 66 while on trial for war crimes.

Nationalist Chinese authorities on Taiwan crush opposition to their rule (see 1945). The "February 28 Incident" actually begins February 22 at Taipei when a police officer hits a woman on the head with his handgun and then fires into a crowd, killing a pedestrian; it ends with Chinese troops shooting their way into the city March 8, breaking into houses, and killing an estimated 10,000 Taiwanese, including the island's elected political leadership (news of the incident is suppressed). The mainland Chinese impose martial law, creating a police state that will continue for more than 40 years.

A Chinese troopship evacuating Nationalist troops from Manchuria sinks off Yingkou (Yingkow) in November, killing an estimated 6,000.

Siam's (Thailand's) military takes control of the government in November, staging a coup d'état that forces former premier Pridi Phanomyung to seek refuge in China (see 1946; 1948).

Western Samoa becomes a UN trust territory administered by New Zealand, whose forces occupied the islands in 1914 and have held them under a League of Nations mandate (see 1962).

Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) is founded by liberal academics and civic, labor, and political leaders to promote and support liberal, internationalist, but anticommunist causes, candidates, and legislation. The ADA establishes headquarters at Washington, D.C., and will become closely allied with the Democratic Party.

Georgia has a political quandary following the death late last year of governor-elect Eugene Talmadge. His racist 33-year-old son Herman E. (Eugene) ran his campaign and covets the governorship himself, the state constitution allows the legislature to choose between the top two candidates, former governor Ellis G. Arnall refuses to move, lieutenant governor-elect M. E. Thompson claims that he is the rightful successor, young Talmadge serves for 67 days, the state supreme court rules that he has not been the actual governor, it gives the governorship to Thompson, and it orders a special election to be held next year; Talmadge will win that election and be elected to a full 4-year term in 1950.

A "Hollywood Black List" of alleged communist sympathizers compiled at a conference of 48 studio executives meeting at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel names an estimated 300 writers, directors, actors, and others known or suspected to have Communist Party affiliations or of having invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination when questioned by the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. Those attending the Waldorf Conference include Barney Balaban, Harry Cohn, William Goetz, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary, Nicholas Schenck, Spyros Skouras, Paul Terry, Walter Wanger, and Albert Warner. The "Hollywood Ten" who refuse to tell the committee whether they have been communists are Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, now 39, who has in fact been a Party member since 1943 but will quit in 1948 after finding Party meetings intolerably boring. The film industry blacklists the "Hollywood Ten" November 25 and all draw short prison sentences for refusing to testify. Dalton Trumbo's screen credits include the 1943 film Tender Comrade with Ginger Rogers, whose mother has tearfully testified before the House Un-American Affairs (Dies) Committee that her daughter had to utter the "communist line" in the film "Share and share alike—that's democracy" (see 1950).

Retired U.S. Marine commander Evans Carlson of 1942 Carlson's Raiders fame dies at Plymouth, Conn., May 27 at age 51, having been forced by malaria and battle wounds to retire last year from active service; former Canadian prime minister Richard B. Bennett, Viscount Bennett, dies at Mickleham, Surrey, June 27 at age 76; former diplomat and international civil servant John G. Winant commits suicide at his Concord, N.H., home November 3 at age 59, depressed by events that have unfolded since the death of President Roosevelt 2½ years ago. The first copy of his only book Letter from Grosvenor Square arrives at his house later in the day.

Helicopter designer Frank Piasecki shows September 12 that his HRP-1 Rescuer can pick up 10 men where a Sikorski helicopter can pick up only one (see transportation, 1945). Now 27, Piasecki has been the first man to manufacture large helicopters; he delivers his "Flying Banana" to the U.S. Navy and works on an HRP-2 model for Marine Corps assault missions (see transportation, 1949).

North American Aviation flies its first swept-wing jet fighter October 1. Powered by a General Electric J-47 engine with 5,200 pounds of thrust, it has a maximum speed of 685 miles per hour, a cruising speed of 540 mph, a range of 1,200 miles, a service ceiling of 49,000 feet, and can carry six .50-caliber machines guns plus eight five-inch rockets or 2,000 pounds of bombs. The first production model of the F-86 Sabre will fly May 20 of next year, and 4 months later will set a speed record of 670.9 miles per hour (see 1950).

A U.S. Bell X-1 rocket plane piloted by West Virginia-born U.S. Air Force captain Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager, 24, reaches Mach 1.06 (750 miles per hour) October 14 at California's Murac Dry Air Field (later Edward Air Force Base); it breaks the sound barrier that has been broken up to now only by planes diving earthward with help from gravity.

Avions Marcel Dassault Breguet Aviation is founded by French aviation pioneer Marcel-Ferdinand (Bloch) Dassault of 1916 variable pitch propeller fame, who survived 3 years' imprisonment at Buchenwald and has converted to Roman Catholicism, adopting the pseudonym used by one of his brothers in the French resistance (d'assault means literally "on the attack"). Now 55, Dassault will produce Mirage fighter planes and make his company France's leading aeronautical firm.

The Soviet MiG-15 fighter plane that makes its maiden flight in December has a performance speed of 669 miles per hour at sea level, 605 mph at 35,000 feet, and a service ceiling of 50,800 feet (15.484 meters). Designed by Artyom Ivanovich Mikoyan and Mikhail Yosipovich Gurevitch using captured German technology, the swept-wing "aircraft-soldier" will go into service for the Red Army in 1949 and develop an enviable reputation for rugged reliability, maneuverability, speed, and firepower (see 1950).

The AK-47 (Avtomar-Kalashnikov-47) designed by Soviet inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov, 27, is a cheap, automatic, compact, easily maintained assault rifle that will be used worldwide by soldiers, guerrillas, and criminal elements. A tank sergeant during the war, Kalashnikov was wounded in battle, became obsessed with the superiority of German weapons, and devised a gas-operated gun that uses a short cartridge (7.62 by 39 millimeters) and works on the principle of a machine gun: the gas from each round is recycled into the piston and used to load the next round. Kalashnikov brought his prototype to the Aviation Institute at Alma-Ata and was soon sent to Moscow to compete with other Soviet designers. Production begins on the AK-47, whose technology will be licensed free to gunmakers in China, North Korea, and other countries.

Venezuelan voters elect novelist Rómulo Gallegos to the presidency by an overwhelming majority (see coup, 1945). Now 62, Gallegos helped Rómulo Betancourt found the liberal Acción Democrática Party 6 years ago, and Provisional President Betancourt has pushed through a revision of the nation's constitution to provide for election of presidents by direct popular vote rather than by the national legislature, with candidates to be native born, over 30, and ineligible for reelection until 10 years after the end of a 5-year term (but see 1948).

Paraguay has a civil war as Liberals revolt against the reactionary regime of Gen. Higinio Morinigo, who has ruled since the death of Gen. José Estigarribia in 1940. Morinigo has rewarded the Colorados and persecuted the Liberals, but it is the Colorados who depose him, and the country will have six weak presidents in the next 6 years (see 1949; Stroessner, 1954).

President Truman appoints Luis Muñoz Marín to the governorship of Puerto Rico (see 1940). Now 49 and the island's first native-born governor, Munoz Marín will be elected governor next year in Puerto Rico's first gubernatorial election (see 1950).

human rights, social justice

India outlaws "untouchability" in the age-old caste system, but discrimination against the people Mahatma Gandhi calls harijans—who represent 15 percent of the population—will continue for decades (see 1932; 1946).

The Documentation Center on the Fate of Jews and Their Persecutors is founded at Linz, Austria, by former Lwów architect Simon Wiesenthal, 38, who bribed an NKVD commissar to avoid being exiled to Siberia in 1939, was sent to a labor camp by the Germans in 1941, survived concentration camps, and has been reunited with his wife, who posed as a Pole during the war. Having lost 89 family members in the Holocaust, they and 30 volunteers work to aid Jewish refugees and collect evidence for war crimes trials (see 1961).

A Polish court at Warsaw tries Auschwitz extermination camp commandant Rudolf Franz Hoess and finds him guilty of mass murder (from 1 million to 2.5 million inmates died in his gas chambers between 1940 and 1945); he is hanged at Auschwitz April 15 at age 46.

An Allied military tribunal sentences former Buchenwald commander's wife Ilsa Koch to hard labor for life (see 1942). She gives birth to a child fathered by a prison guard, her sentence will be commuted to 4 years' imprisonment on grounds of insufficient evidence, but a West German court will try her again in 1949 and sentence her to life imprisonment (see 1967).

South African apartheid opponent and civil rights activist Anton Lembede dies in July at age 34. A sharecropper's son who earned a master's degree in philosophy from the University of South Africa, he provided much of the philosophical basis for black resistance to white supremacy, rejecting Marxism as being insufficiently African and overly materialistic but espousing a form of socialism.

The first U.S. major league black baseball player signs with the Brooklyn Dodgers and takes the field April 11.

President Truman gives a short speech at the Lincoln Memorial July 27 and risks his political future by declaring forcefully that the Constitution guarantees equal rights for blacks (see Civil Rights Commission, 1946; integration, 1948).

Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo (D. Miss.) dies of heart disease after three operations for oral cancer at New Orleans August 21 at age 69, following revelations that he has converted thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to his own personal use. Black voters have petitioned the Senate not to seat Bilbo, protesting that his reelection last year was based on "inflammatory appeals" that provoked violence and intimidated many blacks from going to polling places. The white supremacist has fought for 40 years against voting rights for blacks.

Congress forbids the new CIA to have "police, subpoena, law enforcement powers or internal security functions" inside the United States lest the agency conflict with the FBI and jeopardize the privacy of American citizens, but beginning in the 1950s and especially after 1967 CIA operatives will undertake domestic surveillance activities, including break-ins, surreptitious mail inspections, and telephone wiretaps, and will compile intelligence files on at least 10,000 Americans in violation of the National Security Act.

U.S. feminists mourn the death of suffragist pioneer Carrie Chapman Catt, who dies at New Rochelle, N.Y., March 9 at age 88, but many cannot forgive her for her racist views.

A Japanese Equal Rights Amendment adopted May 5 gives women legal grounds when they bring lawsuits charging discrimination. Pushed through by U.S. occupation authorities, the amendment makes it illegal to discriminate by sex for political, social, or economic reasons. A Department of Women's and Children's Affairs is established and a woman, Kikue Yamakawa, 57, is appointed the first director. A Japanese civil law enacted in December allows women over age 18 to marry without parental permission, permits women as well as men to be heads of families, denies husbands rights over their wives' property, and gives female offspring equal rights of inheritance.

Women in Bulgaria, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.

Argentina grants female suffrage September 9 following efforts by Evita Perón (see 1951).

philanthropy

Automobile pioneer Henry Ford's death April 7 makes the Ford Foundation that was set up by his late son Edsel in 1936 the richest philanthropic organization in the history of the world. Ford's will leaves 90 percent of his $625 million fortune tax free to the foundation, providing it with more funds for useful projects in education and other fields.

commerce

The Marshall Plan proposed at Harvard Commencement exercises June 5 by Secretary of State George C. Marshall would give financial aid to European countries "willing to assist in the task of recovery." Dean Acheson, Chip Bohlen, and George F. Kennan Jr. have all helped to draft the 1,200-word, 12-minute speech, but Marshall delivers it in a monotone, the loudspeakers in the Yard malfunction, the speech contains no specifics or timetables, and the press fails to grasp its significance, focusing rather on Marshall's point that Europe must take responsibility for shaping its own future. Initial public reaction is negative (a Gallup Poll survey shows that only 18 percent support the idea of U.S. economic aid to Europe), President Truman asks Congress November 17 to appropriate $597 million for immediate aid to France, Italy, and Austria, Truman says that failure to do so will support enslavement of European peoples, the White House works with Republicans such as former isolationist Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, now 63, to build bipartisan support, and Congress votes December 23 to authorize $540 million for interim aid to France, Italy, Austria, and China. In the next 40 months it will authorize $12.5 billion in Marshall Plan aid to restore the economic health of free Europe (and halt the spread of communism); between now and 1951 the Marshall Plan will serve as a catalyst in reviving Europe's economy; it will cost about 2 percent of America's gross national product each year, but most of the money appropriated will come back to the United States as Europeans buy U.S. exports (see 1948).

Congress enacts the Taft-Hartley Act June 23 over President Truman's veto; amending the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, it restricts organized labor's power to strike (see Smith-Connally Act, 1943), outlaws the closed shop (which requires that employers hire only union members), permanently bans use of union funds for political purposes, introduces an 80-day "cooling off" period before a strike or lockout can begin, and empowers the government to obtain injunctions where strikes "will imperil the national health or safety" if allowed to occur or continue. Sen. Robert A. Taft (R. Ohio), now 57, and Rep. Fred A. Hartley, 45, (R. N.J.) have introduced the legislation, whose provisions explicitly legalize political action committees (PACs) for labor unions as well as corporations; the American Federation of Labor (AFL) follows the example set by the CIO in 1943 and establishes a political action committee (see public election funding, 1974).

U.S. coal mines return to private ownership June 30 after operation by the federal government since May 22 of last year. UMW workers threaten a new strike but receive a wage boost of 44.375¢ per hour July 7. The United Mine Workers withdraws from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in December as it did in 1936 (see 1946).

The minimum wage in America is 40¢ per hour; a new Ford or Chevrolet sedan sells for less than $2,000 and milk goes for 20¢/quart.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) signed by 23 nations at Geneva October 30 will lead to a significant lowering of tariff barriers, end some tariff discrimination, and help revitalize world trade among the major powers. The 23 signatories include China, they account for 80 percent of world trade, and 10 of them (among them Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States) sign a protocol October 30 calling for GATT to come into force as of January 1 next year.

Japanese labor leaders announce plans for a general strike February 1 to demand higher wages and better working conditions (see 1946). The announcement raises fears that communist elements are taking over the nation's new labor movement, Gen. MacArthur bans the strike, police backed up by U.S. tanks and aircraft break up demonstrations, but a Japanese labor law enacted September 1 establishes a minimum wage, and limits working hours for the first time. It requires that employers give days off (including 2 extra days per month for menstruating women), provide for 6 weeks' maternity leave, allow mothers time to nurse their infants, and pay equal wages for equal work (a provision that will generally be ignored).

Allied General Headquarters at Tokyo begins breaking up the zaibatsu that controlled Japan's industry before the war, and although the old family companies that formed the consortium will remain strong factors in the Japanese economy (they include Itochu, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, Asano, and others), the prewar and wartime heads of those industrial combines are purged along with thousands of government officials, allowing middle managers to move up into leadership positions in separate enterprises. The cozy relationships that existed between the zaibatsu and major commercial banks continue.

South Korea's Hyundai Group has its beginnings in a construction firm founded by entrepreneur Chung Ju Yung, 31, whose company will confine its activities to South Korea until 1965.

Bolivian tin mining tycoon Simon I. Patiño dies at Buenos Aires April 20 at age 84, having made himself one of the world's five richest men.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 31 at 181.16, up from 177.20 at the end of 1946.

retail, trade

The first duty-free airport store opens at Ireland's Shannon Airport.

Merchant Harry G. Selfridge dies at London May 8 at age 83, having been ousted from control of Selfridges by bankers in 1939 because of his personal extravagances.

energy

Britain nationalizes electricity production under a new Electricity Authority that takes over 550 private electric companies.

Britain's first atomic pile comes into operation in August at Harwell under the direction of physicist Sir John D. Cockcroft, now 49, who directed the nation's air defense research during the war.

Bechtel Corp. engineers headed by Stephen Bechtel work to build the 1,068-mile Trans-Arabian pipeline across Saudi Arabia.

Petroleum prospectors strike oil at Leduc, Alberta; nearby Edmonton becomes a boom town, and further finds in the next few years will stimulate the growth of the western Canadian area from one based entirely on agriculture to one with a mixed economy.

transportation

Britain nationalizes her transportation under terms of a Transport Act that receives royal assent August 6 (see 1948). Parliament gives a new Transportation Company responsibility for rehabilitating the nation's bankrupt and antiquated railroads and canals while it reorganizes 3,000 trucking firms (see 1953). Britain's first diesel electric locomotive goes into service on the London Midland and Scottish Railroad.

Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant in the British sector of occupied Germany turns out 8,978 vehicles as German industry increases civilian production (see 1939). British Army engineer Ivan Hirst, 31, has retooled the company's bombed-out factory, and his superiors have ordered 20,000 of Hitler's "people's car" for transport duty; the British will offer the plant to Henry Ford II next year, his advisers will tell him that it is "not worth a damn," and he will reject the offer (see 1949).

B. F. Goodrich introduces the world's first tubeless automobile tires; they seal themselves when punctured.

General Motors founder W. C. Durant dies at New York March 18 at age 85. Wiped out by the 1929 stock market crash, he has regained some of his wealth through real estate dealings; automobile industry pioneer Henry Ford dies at Dearborn, Mich., April 7 at age 83. His heirs pay a federal tax of only $21 million on a taxable estate of $70 million and are left in control of Ford Motor Company; automaker Ettore Bugatti dies at Paris August 21 at age 65 (his eldest son has predeceased him and his firm will not survive).

The round-the-world speed record set by Howard Hughes in 1938 falls August 10 when pilot William P. Odom arrives at Chicago's Douglas Airport after a flight of 73 hours, 5 minutes, 11 seconds—more than 18 hours faster than the 1938 record.

Oregon-born Marine Corps veteran and military test pilot Marion E. Carl sets a world airspeed record August 25. Now 31, Carl distinguished himself in combat during the war; he flies a Douglas Skystreak at more than 650 miles per hour over California's Muroc Dry Lake (see altitude record, 1953).

The "Spruce Goose" taxis across Long Beach Harbor in California November 2 and takes off for a one-mile flight at a maximum altitude of 70 feet with Howard Hughes at the controls (see Lockheed Constellation, 1944). Built by Hughes at a cost of $23 million to taxpayers, it is the largest aircraft ever made—a 140-ton, eight-engine seaplane, made largely of birch, with a wingspan of 320 feet. Hughes has built it as a prototype troop transport, but the Pentagon rejects his design and the huge plane goes into storage, never to fly again. Hughes Aircraft Co. received $40 million in government contracts during the war, Sen. Ralph (Owen) Brewster, 59 (R. Me.), has launched a subcommittee investigation in August, Hughes has accused him of accepting money from Juan Trippe of Pan American Airways and trying to blackmail him (Hughes) into selling TWA to Pan Am in exchange for quashing the inquiry, Brewster has appeared as a witness before his own committee to deny the accusation under oath, but the inquiry will come to naught.

technology

The germanium transistor demonstrated December 23 by Bell Laboratories physicists William B. (Bradford) Shockley, 38, John Bardeen, 40, and Walter H. (Houser) Brattain, 46, will supplant the glass vacuum tube pioneered by Bell Labs physicist H. D. Arnold in 1912. Made from a paper clip, two slivers of gold foil, and a slab of germanium on a crystal plate, it will replace bulky tubes that often overheat and break down, making long-distance calling expensive. (Production problems delay its practical use, it will be kept secret for 7 months, and no patent applications will be filed until its public announcement June 30 of next year.) Initially known simply as a solid-state amplifier (Des Moines-born Bell Labs engineer John R. [Robinson] Pierce, 37, will give it the name transistor next year), the tiny but rugged three-electrode semiconductor regulates the flow of electricity; it will soon be made of silicon, rather than the germanium, will permit miniaturization of electronic devices such as computers, radios, and television sets (microelectronics), and will lead to the development of guided missiles; within 50 years there will be more than 20 billion microchips in the world, each containing upward of a million transistors (see Texas Instruments, 1954; mesa, 1955).

science

The finding that sexual reproduction occurs in bacteria opens up a whole new world of study and lays the groundwork for future work in bacterial genetics. Montclair, N.J.-born Columbia University graduate student Joshua Lederberg, 22, and Boulder, Colo.-born Yale geneticist Edward L. (Lawrie) Tatum, 37, make the discovery.

Paris-born Argentine biochemist Luis Federico Leloir, 41, at Buenos Aires gains financial backing to open the Institute for Biochemical Research, where he will study the formation and utilization of glycogen and the formation and breakdown of the milk sugar lactose in the human body. His work will lead him to discover certain liver enzymes that are involved in the synthesis of glycogen from glucose and—most notably—to discover sugar nucleotides, the key elements involved in the storage of sugars in the body and their conversion into energy.

British physicist Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, 50, at the University of Manchester advances the theory that "all massive rotating bodies are magnetic." He has worked on cosmic rays and especially on the electrical particles known as "mesons."

English physicist Cecil F. (Frank) Powell, 43, employs photographic plates exposed on mountain tops and in ascension balloons to record the paths of cosmic rays and their interaction to reveal the existence of the pion and the process whereby it decays into two other particles—the antimuon (mu-meson) and neutrino (see Reines, 1956).

Budapest-born British physicist Dennis Gabor, 47, of Thompson-Houston Co. invents holography, a technique of three-dimensional photography based on creating an interference pattern of two light beams on film. Gabor has worked for the company since 1933 on improving the resolving power of electron microscopes that are 100 times better than ordinary microscopes but still do not allow scientists to "see" atomic lattices—the patterned arrangement of atoms.

German-born Columbia University physicist Polykarp Kusch, 36, uses precise atomic beam studies to demonstrate that the magnetic properties of the electron are not in agreement with existing theories. He will make accurate measurements of the magnetic moment of the electron and its behavior in hydrogen and will use radio-frequency beam techniques to measure with precise accuracy a large number of atomic, molecular, and nuclear properties.

Norwegian ethnologist-explorer Thor Heyerdahl, 32, leaves Callao, Peru, with a five-man international crew on a balsa raft April 28 to test his theory that the Polynesian islands may have been populated by peoples from South America. Made of green logs cut in upland Ecuador and floated to Callao, the radio-equipped Kon-Tiki (named for an ancient Inca god) and its occupants cross 4,300 miles of open Pacific in 100 days before the craft is wrecked August 7 on a coral atoll (the expedition finds no trace of man in the "crystal clear" water and survives mainly by eating sharks and other fish caught en route). Most scientists remain unconvinced by the Heyerdahl experiment (seeRa, 1969).

British archaeologist Francis Steele reconstructs the 18th century B.C. Hammurabi law code from excavations made at Nippur before 1900.

A Bedouin boy exploring a cave at Qumran, northwest of Palestine's Dead Sea, discovers an earthenware jar containing scrolls of parchment containing all but two small parts of the Old Testament Book of Isaiah. Written in the 1st century B.C. by Jews of the obscure, ascetic Essene sect that was later wiped out by the Romans, the parchments have been wrapped in yards of cloth and covered with pitch. Sold piecemeal by the boy who found them, they will greatly expand knowledge of ancient Judaism and will be followed by several more finds of biblical manuscripts in the area.

Colorado-born chemist Willard F. (Frank) Libby, 38, finds that all organic materials contain carbon-14 atoms that decay at a measurable rate, thus beginning development of an "atomic clock" that will determine geological age and clear up many mysteries of archaeology and anthropology (see 1940). Libby worked on the Manhattan Project, helping to develop the gaseous-diffusion method of separate uranium isotopes; his finding will make it possible for the first time to date organic archaeological remains within narrow limits of time.

Mineralogist-petrologist Victor M. Goldschmidt dies at Oslo March 20 at age 59; Nobel physicist Philipp Lenard at Messelhausen May 20 at age 84; Nobel physicist Max Planck at Göttingen October 4 at age 89. Munich's 36-year-old Kaiser Wilhelm Society will be renamed next year, becoming the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Zur Förderung der Wissenschaften).

The Journal of Meteorology devotes its entire October issue to a paper by San Francisco-born meteorologist Jule Gregory Charney, 30, who has revised his UCLA doctoral dissertation "The Dynamics of Long Waves in Baroclinic Westerly Current." Charney's work on atmospheric dynamics revolutionizes the science of weather forecasting, but forecasts remain problematic.

medicine

Yale University botanist Paul R. (Rufus) Burkholder, 45, examines a sample of soil taken from a field near Caracas, Venezuela, and discovers a substance that seems to kill a wide variety of bacteria. Parke, Davis will market it under the name chloromycetin, or chloramphenicol, and it will prove effective in curing previously untreatable diseases, including typhoid, typhus, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Widespread spraying of DDT reduces incidence of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in tropical and subtropical countries (see Muller, 1939). The spray acts primarily as a repellent: studies will show that only 3 percent as many mosquitoes enter huts that have been sprayed with DDT as those sprayed with the most widely-used alternative, and most leave immediately without biting, but reports begin to come in of fly and mosquito strains that have developed resistance to DDT and the British-developed benzene hexachloride.

The United States has more than 27,000 new cases of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis) (see 1946). Although only a tiny percentage of Americans are affected (most cases are asymptomatic), the epidemic creates a panic as the virus strikes people from all walks of life, most of them children; schools close in a vain effort to resist its spread, students' books and belongings are burned, lockers are fumigated, but medical authorities and public officials are at a loss in trying to deal with a disease that continues to leave victims crippled or dead (see 1950).

Bacteriologist-immunologist Sir Almroth E. Wright dies at Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, April 30 at age 85. He retired from St. Mary's Hospital, London, last year, having pioneered vaccination against typhoid fever and other diseases (British scientists have begun using the word microbiologist to replace bacteriologist).

religion

Oklahoma faith healer Oral Roberts, 29, claims to pray for God's help in healing the ill and deformed, who are then healed by God himself. Evangelist Roberts will start the healing ministry Healing Waters next year and appear frequently on radio and television; his Pentecostal Holiness Church will grow to have 2 million members by 1960.

The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism by New York-born Baptist minister Carl F. H. (Ferdinand Howard) Henry, 34, revives interest in the literal interpretation of Scripture, which has been in decline since it was discredited in the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial. Henry gives an intellectual defense of spreading the fundamentalist faith (seeChristianity Today, 1956).

Members of the 76-year-old Hungarian hasidic sect known as Satmars settle in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, N.Y., under the leadership of their Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum, 61, who started his own hasidic movement 15 years ago in the Carpatho-Russian town of Satmar (Satu Mare) and escaped from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, making his way to Switzerland and Palestine. Some of his followers have preceded him, taking up residence on and near Bedford Avenue (see Lubavitchers, 1945). Vehemently opposed to Zionism, the Satmars will grow to become the city's largest hasidic group. Like the Lubavitchers but unlike earlier Jewish immigrants, they are determined to resist losing their identity and become "Americanized": their beards, peyes (long sidelocks), and broad-brimmed black fur hats will make men of the community conspicuous; their wives will shave their heads and wear wigs, and they will segregate their children by gender beginning at age 3 or 4. Rabbi Teitelbaum will lead the group until his death in 1979 at age 93, and Williamsburg's hasidic community will grow in the next 50 years to number an estimated 40,000, with Satmars constituting the most sizeable group.

education

Brooklyn, N.Y.-born CCNY graduate Stanley H. Kaplan, 29, begins preparing high-school students for the College Entrance Examination Board's Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) (see 1926). Kaplan began a tutoring service (the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center) 8 years ago in the basement of his immigrant parents' Flatbush home on Avenue K, a Coney Island student has come to him with the SAT that is just coming into wider use for college applicants, and when she aces the exam she tells all her friends about Kaplan, who will move to a two-story house on Bedford Avenue, divide its basement into classrooms, and later rent a podiatrist's office near King's Highway at the Brighton Beach subway stop, charging substantial fees for his services. Educators will insist that the SAT is "uncoachable" and disparage Kaplan as the "cram king," but his students will routinely do so well on the tests that he will go national in the 1970s and become a multi-millionaire.

communications, media

Chicago-born Bell Laboratories researcher Richard Wesley Hamming, 32, devises techniques for finding and correcting a single error in a string of data; his method can also find two errors and correct one of them. Used initially in telephone and computer switches, the Hamming Codes will later make possible such innovations as compact discs, modems, and satellite communications.

Oregon-born Bell Laboratories engineer Stephen O. (Oswald) Rice, 39, develops a statistical representation of noise.

Meet the Press debuts 10/5 on a New York radio station with New York-born American Mercury magazine publisher Lawrence E. (Edmund) Spivak, 44, moderating a "spontaneous, unrehearsed weekly news conference of the air" produced by onetime fiction writer Martha Rountree, 30. Journalists interview prominent news figures on the show will go on NBC television beginning in November 1947 and be moderated by Spivak until November 1975.

Victor Talking Machine Co. founder Eldridge (Reeves) Johnson dies of a heart attack at his Moorestown, N.J., home November 14 at age 78.

The 1-year-old German newspaper Die Welt begins publishing at Berlin as well as at Hamburg and Essen; circulation rises almost overnight to 600,000, Die Welt will become a daily in 1949, and circulation will rise to more than 1 million (see Springer, 1953).

Publisher Marshall Field III acquires the Chicago Sun and merges it with the 94-year-old Chicago Times February 28 to create the Sun-Times (see 1959; Conrad Black, 1994).

"Steve Canyon" makes its debut on newspaper cartoon pages. After 13 years of drawing "Terry and the Pirates," Milton Caniff leaves the "Terry" strip to be carried on by others.

New York Herald Tribune publisher Ogden Mills Reid dies at New York January 3 at age 64; type designer and printer Frederic W. Goudy at Marlboro, N.Y., May 11 at age 82. His Deepdene, Forum, Garamond, Goudy, Goudy Old Style, Hadriano, Village, and other typefaces will be used for generations; newspaper-chain founder Ira C. Copley dies of arteriosclerotic heart disease in the Copley Hospital at Aurora, Ill., November 2 at age 83.

literature

Nonfiction: Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man, Se Questo E un Uomo) by Turin chemist-author Primo Levi, 28, who survived 10 months at the Nazi death camp and describes its horrors with the clinical detachment of a scientist; Of Fear and Freedom (Paura della libertà) by Carlo Levi asserts the need for intellectual freedom despite the inherent dread of it; The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West; The Last Days of Hitler by former British intelligence officer Hugh R. (Redwald) Trevor-Roper, 33; The Nürnberg Case by Robert H. Jackson; Lenin and the Russian Revolution by Balliol College, Oxford, historian (John Edward) Christopher Hill, 35; Planned Chaos by Austrian-born New York University libertarian economist Ludwig (Edler) von Mises, 65, is about socialist totalitarianism; Economic Analysis of Guaranteed Wages by Alvin H. Hansen and Indiana-born MIT economist Paul (Anthony) Samuelson, 32; Agriculture in an Unstable Economy by South Dakota-born University of Chicago economist Theodore W. (William) Schultz, 43; From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes by Oklahoma-born Howard University historian John Hope Franklin, 32; Usage and Abusage by New Zealand-born British lexicographer Eric (Honeywood) Partridge, 53; Gamesmanship by BBC writer Stephen Potter, 47; The Proper Bostonians by former Harvard Crimson editor Cleveland Amory, 29, who at age 22 became the youngest editor of the Saturday Evening Post.

Fabian socialist economist-historian Sidney Webb, Baron Passfield of Passfield Corner, dies at Liphook, Hampshire, October 13 at age 88; philosopher H. A. Prichard at Oxford December 29 at age 86; philosopher Alfred North Whitehead at Cambridge, Mass., December 30 at age 86.

Fiction: The Plague (La Peste) by Albert Camus; Dr. Faustus by Thomas Mann; The Twins of Nuremberg (Die Zwillingen von Nurnberg) by German novelist Hermann Kesten, 47; Nekyia: Report of a Survivor (Nekyia, Bericht eines Ueberlebenden) by Hamburg-born novelist Hans Erich Nossack, 46, who tries to record the horror that he witnessed when the city was set ablaze by Allied bombers in 1943; The Woman of Rome (La Romana) by Alberto Moravia; The Path of the Nest of Spiders (Il sentiero de nidi di ragno) by Italian novelist Italo Calvino, 24; The Comrade (Il compagno) by Cesare Pavese; Under the Volcano by English novelist Malcolm Lowry, 38; Tea with Mrs. Goodman by English novelist Philip Toynbee, 31; Charade by London barrister-novelist John (Clifford) Mortimer, 24; Querelle of Brest (Querelle de Brest) by Jean Genet; If I Were You (Si j'étais vous) by Julian Green; Hetty Dorval by Canadian novelist Ethel (Davis) Wilson (née Bryant), 57 (born in South Africa, she was taken to England after her parents died and from there taken to Canada); Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata; The Setting Sun (Shayo) by Osamu Dazai examines an aristocratic family that has been forced at the end of the war to cope with a new life devoid of its former wealth and prestige. Japan's new poor will be called Setting Sun people (shayo-zoku); The Middle of the Journey by Columbia University professor Lionel Trilling, 42; Tales of the South Pacific by New York-born writer James (Albert) Michener, 40, who served in the Pacific during the war; The Victim by Saul Bellow; End as a Man by Atlanta-born novelist Calder (Bayard) Willingham (Jr.), 24; Aurora Dawn; or, The True Story of Andrew Reale, Containing a Faithful Account of the Great Riot, Together with the Complete Texts of Michael Wilde's Oration and Father Stanfield's Sermon by New York-born novelist Herman Wouk, 32, who served in the navy during the war; The Neon Wilderness (stories) by Detroit-born Chicago novelist Nelson Algren (originally Nelson Ahlgren Abraham), 38, who served as a medical corpsman during the war; The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford; Gentleman's Agreement by New York-born novelist Laura (Kean) Hobson (née Zametkin), 47, examines the covert anti-Semitic practices institutionalized in American society; The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck; The Harder They Fall by Budd Schulberg; Dark Carnival (stories) by Illinois-born author Ray (Douglas) Bradbury, 27; Rocket Ship Galileo by Missouri-born science-fiction novelist Robert A. (Anson) Heinlein, 40; The Harp in the South by New Zealand-born Australian writer Ruth Park, 24; Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie; Beyond the Blue Mountains by English novelist Jean Plaidy (Eleanor Burford Hibbert), 41, whose many books, written under three different pen names, will be translated into 20 languages.

Novelist and political reformer Winston Churchill (no relation to the British statesman) dies of a heart attack at Winter Park, Fla., March 12 at age 75; novelist-travel writer Charles Nordhoff of a heart attack at Santa Barbara, Calif., April 11 at age 60; Scribner's editor Maxwell E. Perkins at Stamford, Conn., June 17 at age 62; Baroness Emmuska Orczy (Mrs. Montague Barstow) at London November 12 at age 82.

Poetry: The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue by W. H. Auden; "Day After Day" ("Giorno dopo Giorno") by Salvatore Quasimodo; Dialogues with Leuco (Dialoghi con Leuco) by Cesare Pavese; A Soul for Sale by Patrick Kavanagh.

Juvenile: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, with illustrations by Clement Hurd; Bonfires and Broomsticks by Mary Norton; McElligot's Pool by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), who spent the war years working with animator Chuck Jones and director Frank Capra to produce training films for the military; The School for Cats by Esther Averill.

Author Angela Brazil dies at Preston, Lancashire, March 13 at age 77; Hugh Lofting at Santa Monica, Calif., September 27 at age 61.

art

Painting: Ulysses with His Sirens by Pablo Picasso; Young English Girl by Henri Matisse; M. Plume, Portrait of Henri Michaux by Jean Dubuffet; Woman With Bathtub by the prolific Paris-born painter Bernard Buffet, 19, who has his first one-man show; Das Matterhorn by Oskar Kokoschka, who fled Austria in 1938 and has been living in England; Y by North Dakota-born painter Clyfford Still, 41; Full Fathom Five by Jackson Pollock; Betrothal II, Dark Green Painting, The Plan and the Song, and Agony by Arshile Gorky; Promenade (oil on panel) by Lee Krasner, who 2 years ago married painter Jackson Pollock. Pierre Bonnard dies at Le Cannet, north of Cannes, January 23 at age 79; painter-forger Han van Meegeren (Henricus Antonius van Meegeren) of a heart attack at Amsterdam December 30 at age 58 before beginning a 1-year prison sentence for having faked at least 14 works by Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch, some of which he sold before the war for enormous prices (van Meegeren was arrested in 1945 after occupation authorities found one of his fake Vermeers in the late Hermann Goering's looted collection and traced it to him).

Sculpture: Three Standing Figures by Henry Moore; Pointing Man by Alberto Giacometti; Horseman (Il Cavaliere) by Marino Marini; The Blind Leading the Blind (wood) and Quarantania (painted wood on wooden base) by French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, 36; Pendour (wood) by Barbara Hepworth.

photography

The Polaroid Land Camera patented by Edwin H. Land of 1932 polaroid lens fame develops its own films within its body and produces a sepia print in 60 seconds (see 1948).

ASA ratings developed by the American Standards Association standardize U.S. film speeds.

Photographs: The Walk to Paradise Garden by Kansas-born LIFE magazine photojournalist W. (William) Eugene Smith, 28, who was critically wounded 2 years ago while covering the invasion of Okinawa and has undergone 32 operations; Little Patriot, American Legion Parade, New York City, Shoeshine Boy, and West Village by New York photographer Ruth Orkin, 26, whose pictures of street life and celebrities will appear regularly in LIFE, Look, and other major magazines.

theater, film

Theater: All My Sons by New York-born playwright Arthur Miller, 32, 1/29 at New York's Coronet Theater, with Ed Begley, 46, 328 perfs.; John Loves Mary by Norman Krasna 2/4 at New York's Booth Theater (to Music Box Theater 3/17/1947), with Tom Ewell, Dutch-born ingénue Nina Foch, 22, Harry Bannister, William Prince, Stratford, Conn.-born actor Loring Smith, 51, 423 perfs.; The Prophet's Diamond (II diamante del profeta) by Italian playwright Carlo Terron, 33, 4/2 at Rome's Teatro Valle; The Maids (Les Bonnes) by Jean Genet 4/19 at the Théâtre de l'Atelier, Paris; El Gesticulador by Mexican playwright Rodolfo Usigli 5/17 at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes; director Margo Jones, now 34, opens her Theater 1947 June 3 on the grounds of the State Fair Association at Dallas with a performance of William Inge's new play Farther Off from Heaven (the theater-in-the-round will change its name each New Year's Eve and before her accidental death in 1955 Jones will produce 85 plays, 57 of them from new scripts); Command Decision by Des Moines-born playwright William Wister Haines, 39, 10/1 at New York's Fulton Theater, with White Plains, N.Y.-born actor James (Allen) Whitmore, 26, Paul Kelly, Jay Fassett, 408 perfs.; Medea by Robinson Jeffers 10/20 at New York's National Theater, with Judith Anderson, Shakespearean actor John Gielgud, 43, Florence Reed, 214 perfs.; Happy Birthday by Anita Loos 11/2 at New York's Broadhurst Theater, with Helen Hayes as a drab Newark librarian who comes to life in a barroom, 564 perfs.; Ring Round the Moon (L'invitation au château) by Jean Anouilh 11/4 at the Théâtre de l'Atelier, Paris; For Love or Money by F. Hugh Herbert 11/4 at Henry Miller's Theater, New York, with London-born actor John Loder (originally John Lowe), 49, New York-born actress June Lockhart, 22, 263 perfs.; A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams 12/3 at New York's Ethel Barrymore Theater, with Omaha-born actor Marlon Brando, 23, as Stanley Kowalski, Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, 855 perfs.

The Actors Studio is founded October 5 in a former Presbyterian church built in 1859 at 432 West 44th Street. Former Group Theater members Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan, and New York-born actor-teacher Robert "Bobby" Lewis, now 38, have launched the project to help actors develop their craft. Kazan teaches acting fundamentals to a group of 15; Lewis gives an advanced class on the top floor of the Union Methodist Church in West 48th Street to 20 students who include Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Mildred Dunnock, Tom Ewell, John Forsythe, Kim Hunter, Anne Jackson, Sidney Lumet, Karl Malden, E. G. Marshall, Kevin McCarthy, Patricia Neal, William Redfield, Jerome Robbins, Maureen Stapleton, Eli Wallach, and David Wayne. Beginning in 1951 the Studio will engage actor-director Lee Strasberg, now 46, who will serve as artistic director until his death in 1982.

Tony Awards established by the American Theater Wing honor outstanding Broadway plays, directors, performers, scenic designers, costumers, etc. The name Tony honors the late Antoinette Perry, who headed the Theater Wing during World War II; the awards rival the Oscars given since 1928 by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Playwright Louis Kaufman Anspacher dies of a heart attack at Nashville, Tenn., May 10 at age 69; actress Mary Blair at her Pittsburgh home September 17 at age 52; playwright Gregorio Martinez Sierra of cancer at his native Madrid October 1 at age 66; actor Earle Larimore at his New York apartment October 22 at age 48; actor Dudley Digges of a stroke at his New York home October 24 at age 68.

Television: Juvenile Jury 4/3 on NBC with host Jack Barry (to 9/28/1953); Howdy Doody 12/27 on NBC with Buffalo-born piano player-singer-radio disk jockey-puppeteer "Buffalo Bob" Smith (originally Robert Schmidt), 30, who begins each show by asking the Peanut Gallery of children aged 3 to 8 in his studio at Rockefeller Center what time it is, to which they respond in unison, "It's Howdy Doody Time." His mute sidekick Clarabell the Clown (initially Lynbrook, N.Y.-born Bob Keeshan, 20) squirts Buffalo Bob with a seltzer bottle, and audiences laugh also at the redheaded, freckle-faced marionette Howdy Doody created by a team of puppeteers headed by Rufus Rose, 45, and his Iowa-born wife, Margo (née Margaret Skewis), 44, to the specifications of Buffalo Bob, who has introduced the character earlier on a radio show (to 9/30/1960, 2,343 performances).

Radio: You Bet Your Life 10/27 on ABC with Groucho Marx as host of a quiz show (to 1954) (see television, 1950).

Films: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus with Deborah Kerr, Flora Robson, Sabu, London-born actress Jean (Merilyn) Simmons, 18; Robert Rossen's Body and Soul with John Garfield, German-born actress Lilli Palmer (originally Lilli Marie Peiser), 33; Elia Kazan's Boomerang with Dana Andrews, upstate New York-born actress Jane Wyatt, 35, Lee J. Cobb; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going with Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey, Finlay Currie; Michael Curtiz's Life With Father with Irene Dunne, William Powell; George Seaton's Miracle on 34th Street with Edmund Gwenn, Irish-born actress Maureen O'Hara (Maureen Fitzsimmons), 25, Virginia-born actor John Payne, 32, San Francisco-born actress Natalie Wood (Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko), 9; Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema. Also: Jules Dassin's Brute Force with Burt Lancaster, Canadian-born actor Hume Cronyn (originally Hume Blake), 36; George Cukor's A Double Life with Ronald Colman, Signe Hasso; H. C. Potter's The Farmer's Daughter with Loretta Young, Joseph Cotten; Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir with Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison; Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux with Chaplin, Montana-born comedienne Martha Raye (originally Maggie Yvonne Reed), 31; Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley with Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell; Akira Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday with Isao Namazaki, Chieko Nakakita; Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past with Bridgeport, Conn.-born actor Robert Mitchum, 30, Amsterdam, N.Y.-born actor Kirk Douglas (originally Issur Danielovitch Demsky), 28, Washington, D.C.-born actress Jane (originally Bettejane) Greer, 23; Roberto Rosselini's Paisan with Harriet White; Albert Lewis's The Private Affairs of Bel Ami with George Sanders, London-born actress Angela Lansbury (originally Angela Brigid MacGill), 21; Robert Montgomery's Ride the Pink Horse with Montgomery, Jacksonville, Fla.-born ingénue (Dixie) Wanda Hendrix, 19; Irving Pichel's They Won't Believe Me with Robert Young, Susan Hayward, Jane Greer; Irving Rapper's The Voice of the Turtle with Ronald Reagan, Ohio-born actress Eleanor Parker, 25; Zoltan Korda's A Woman's Vengeance with Jessica Tandy, Charles Boyer.

Drive-in movie theaters proliferate across America as more Americans buy automobiles and have families (see 1932). Taking the kids to a drive-in saves the cost of a baby sitter (young children sleep through the show).

Director Ernst Lubitsch dies of a heart attack at his Bel-Air home outside Los Angeles November 30 at age 55; producer-writer Mark Hellinger at Hollywood December 21 at age 44.

music

Broadway musicals: Finian's Rainbow 1/10 at the 46th Street Theater, with Ella Logan, Michigan-born actor David Wayne (Wayne James McMeekan), 33, music by Burton Lane, lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, songs that include "If This Isn't Love," "How Are Things in Glocca Mora," "Old Devil Moon," "Look to the Rainbow," "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love," "That Great Come-and-Get-It-Day," 725 perfs. The musical breaks new ground with social commentary on subjects ranging from the population explosion to the maldistribution of wealth; Brigadoon 3/13 at the Ziegfeld Theater, with James Mitchell, David Brooks, music by Frederick Loewe, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, 28, songs that include "The Heather on the Hill," "Come to Me, Bend to Me," "Almost Like Being in Love," "There But for You Go I," 581 perfs.; Barefoot Boy with Cheek 4/3 at the Martin Beck Theater, with Bronx-born comedian Red Buttons, 27, Nancy Walker, music by Sidney Lippman, lyrics by Sylvia Dee, book by Max Shulman and director George Abbott, 108 perfs.; High Button Shoes 10/9 at the Century Theater, with Phil Silvers, Nanette Fabray, Helen Gallagher, music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn, songs that include "Papa, Won't You Dance with Me," 727 perfs.; Allegro 10/10 at the Majestic Theater, with John Battles, John Conte, Newport, R.I.-born law school dropout Lisa Kirk, 22, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, songs that include "A Fellow Needs a Girl," "The Gentleman Is a Dope," 315 perfs.; Angel in the Wings 12/11 at the Coronet Theater, with Paul and Grace Hartman, Elaine Stritch, music by Bob Hilliard, lyrics by Brooklyn-born songwriter Carl Sigman, 38, songs that include "Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo)," 197 perfs.

Eva Tanguay dies of a stroke at Hollywood January 11 at age 68.

President Truman's daughter Margaret makes her professional radio debut March 16 at age 23, singing with the Detroit Symphony; she appears as a soprano soloist August 23 at the Hollywood Bowl.

The Edinburgh Festival of the Arts opens August 24 with a concert at Usher Hall. The annual summer event will attract performing artists to Scotland from all over the world for more than 50 years.

Opera: The Telephone 2/18 at New York, with music by Gian-Carlo Menotti together with a revised version of his last year's opera The Medium; The Trial of Lucullus 4/18 at the University of California, Berkeley, with music by Roger Sessions, libretto from the 1939 Bertolt Brecht radio play; The Mother of Us All 5/7 at Columbia University's Brander Matthews Hall with Dorothy Dow as Susan B. Anthony, music by Virgil Thomson, libretto by the late Gertrude Stein, who died at Paris last July at age 72; Les Mamelles de Tiresias 6/3 at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, with music by Francis Poulenc, libretto from a surrealist play by Guillaume Apollinaire; Albert Heering 6/20 at Glyndebourne, with Peter Pears singing the title role, Joan Cross as Lady Billows, music by Benjamin Britten. Kathleen Ferrier creates a sensation at Glyndebourne with her acting in Orphéo et Euridice (Lucretia and Euridice will be her only operatic roles). Edith Coates joins the newly-formed Covent Garden company, where she will remain until 1967. Swedish soprano (Anna) Elisabeth Söderström, 20, makes her debut as Bastienne in the 1768 Mozart opera Bastien und Bastienne at Stockholm's Drotningholm Court Theater.

Soprano Grace Moore dies in a KLM DC-3 plane crash at Copenhagen January 31 at age 45; London opera and stage musical soprano Isabel Jay at Monte Carlo February 26 at age 47 while on a cruise with her second husband.

Ballet: Night Journey 5/3 at Cambridge, Mass., with Martha Graham, music by William Schuman; The Seasons 5/17 at New York, with music by John Cage. George Balanchine takes his wife, Maria Tallchief, to Paris, where she becomes the first American since 1839 to dance at the Paris Opéra.

First performances: Symphony No. 2 by Roger Sessions 1/9 at San Francisco; Symphony No. 4 by Arthur Honegger 1/21 at Basel; Symphonia Serena by Paul Hindemith 2/1 at Dallas; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor by George Antheil 2/9 at Dallas; Symphony No. 3 by Morton Gould 2/16 at New York's Carnegie Hall; Bachianas Brasilieras No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra by Heitor Villa-Lobos 2/19 in a CBS Orchestra broadcast; Concerto for Piano and Orchestra by Hindemith 2/27 at Cleveland's Severance Hall, with Jesus Maria Sanroma as soloist; Suite for Harmonica and Orchestra by Darius Milhaud 5/28 at Paris with Baltimore-born mouth organ virtuoso Lawrence Cecil "Larry" Adler, 33, as soloist; Bachianas Brasilieras No. 8 by Villa-Lobos 8/6 at Rome; Symphony No. 6 in E flat minor by Sergei Prokofiev 10/10 at Leningrad; Symphony No. 3 (Hymnus Ambrosianus) by Milhaud 10/30 at Paris.

New York-born musician Tito (originally Ernesto Antonio) Puente Jr., 24, forms the Tito Puente Orchestra (initially the Piccadilly Boys). Puente's nickname is based on his short stature, coming from Ernestito, the diminutive of Ernesto; he met bandleader Charlie Spivak while serving aboard the U.S.S. Santee, has studied at Juilliard, plays at the Palladium dance hall on Broadway, and launches himself on a career that will make him a legend in Latin music.

Brooklyn-born singer Lena Horne, now 30, makes her Carnegie Hall debut 9/29 following years of appearances in nightclubs, black musicals, and Hollywood films; alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, now 27, makes his Carnegie Hall debut the same evening, as does jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, now 29 (Parker has formed a quintet that includes Max Roach and Miles Davis).

Popular songs: "Autumn Leaves" ("Les Feuilles Mort") by French composer Joseph Kosma, lyrics by Jacques Prevert (English lyrics by Johnny Mercer); Londonderry-born Irish tenor Josef Locke, 30, records "Hear My Song, Violetta" and is signed to a contract by EMI Records. Nicknamed "The Singing Bobby" (he has been a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary), Locke was Joseph McLaughlin until 2 years ago, when bandleader-impresario Jack Hylton, 55, booked him into London's Victoria Palace and shortened his name so that it would fit onto the bill; "Ballerina" by Carl Sigman, lyrics by Bob Russell; "Golden Earrings" by Ray Evans and Victor Young, lyrics by Jay Livingston (title song for the film); "The Back Pay Polka" and "For You, For Me, For Evermore" by the late George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin (for the film The Shocking Miss Pilgrim); "Feudin' and Fightin'" by Burton Lane and Al Dubin; "I'll Dance at Your Wedding" by Ben Oakland, lyrics by Herb Magidson; "Linda" by Ann Ronell, lyrics by Jack Lawrence (who has written it for his lawyer Lee Eastman [né Epstein], whose daughter Linda Louise, 6, will grow up to write songs herself); "Ivy" by Hoagy Carmichael; "Open the Door, Richard" by Los Angeles-born tenor saxophonist Jack McVea, 33, and Dan Howell, lyrics by Dusty Fletcher and John Mason; "Too Fat Polka" by Ross MacLean and Arthur Richardson; "Woody Woodpecker" by George Tibbles and Ramey Idriss; "Blue Moon of Kentucky" by Bill Monroe of the Blue Grass Boys. Ella Fitzgerald records "How High the Moon"; Nellie Lutcher, 31, records "Hurry On Down" and "He's a Real Gone Guy"; gospel singer Mahalia Jackson records "Move on Up a Little Higher" and scores a huge success. Seven other hymns recorded by Jackson will have sales of more than a million copies each, including "I Believe," "I Can Put My Trust in Jesus," and "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands."

Folk song collector John Avery Lomax dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at Greenville, Miss., January 26 at age 80. His son Alan, now 33, helped him "discover" the Mississippi-born guitarist-singer Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter in 1934 and carries on his work; Trapp family singing group head Baron Georg von Trapp dies at Stowe, Vt., May 30 at age 66; bandleader Jimmie Lunceford of unknown causes at Seaside, Ore., July 12 at age 45; songwriter Walter Donaldson of a liver ailment at Santa Monica, Calif., July 15 at age 54.

sports

The 3-year-old thoroughbred Jet Pilot, owned by Elizabeth Arden (Florence Nightingale Graham), now 62, wins the Kentucky Derby. Totalisator inventor Sir George Julius dies at Sydney June 28 at age 74.

The National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (Nascar) has its beginnings in a competition held at Martinsville, Va., where tobacco grower's son H. Clay Earles, 35, has acquired 30 acres after seeing crowds attracted to a stock car race at a county fair in nearby North Carolina. A high-school dropout, Earles has built a 0.526-mile track, covered it with oil and other materials to keep down dust, put up 750 seats, and collects a crowd of 6,000, who turn out in their Sunday best but are covered with dust despite claims that the event would be dust free; and entrepreneur Bill France provides a field of drivers and pays for advertising in exchange for 25 percent of the profits (he will found Nascar next year). Daredevil driver Red Byron wins the $500 purse. Tobacco companies and other advertisers will soon begin to sponsor entries, Earles will expand the site to 300 acres with 81,000 seats, and purses will rise until they top $170,000 as Nascar racing becomes a major sport.

Jack Kramer wins in men's singles at Wimbledon, Margaret Osborne, 29, (U.S.) in women's singles; Kramer wins in men's singles at Forest Hills, Althea Louise Brough, 24, in women's singles.

Jackie Robinson signs with the Brooklyn Dodgers and starts the season at first base. Georgia-born Kansas City Monarchs shortstop John Roosevelt Robinson, 28, has been recruited by Dodger scout Clyde Sukeworth, 45, and signed by Dodger president Branch Rickey; the first black baseball player in the major leagues, he will continue through the 1956 season and have a lifetime batting average of .311.

The New York Yankees win the World Series, defeating the Brooklyn Dodgers 4 games to 3 in the first Series to be carried on television.

England defeats Australia at Adelaide through the efforts of Middlesex-born wicket keeper (Thomas) Godfrey "Godders" Evans, 27, who bats for a record 97 minutes without a run as he helps his London-born partner Denis (Charles Scott) Compton, 29, score a century and save the match. Compton scores 3,816 runs and 18 centuries in the course of the year, and English cricket attracts 2 million paying customers; the figure will drop to 500,000 by 1970 as the game loses its attraction for many Britons.

The death of Manolete August 28 plunges Spain into mourning. The multimillionaire matador Manuel Rodriguez has been fatally gored by a Miura bull in the small 8,268-seat ring at Linares and dies at age 30 after a career that has made him a legend.

everyday life

New York's Collyer brothers make headlines when Homer Collyer, 71, is found dead of malnutrition March 21 in a cluttered brownstone at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street. The rat-gnawed body of his brother Langley, 61, is found dead in the house April 8 after searchers have removed 120 tons of rubbish including bicycles, sleds, most of a Model T Ford, a car generator and radiator, the top of a horse-drawn carriage, kerosene stoves, umbrellas, 10 clocks, 14 grand pianos, an organ, a trombone and cornet, three bugles, five violins, 15,000 medical books, thousands of other books, mountains of yellowed newspapers dating to 1918, etc.

The "New Look" designed by Paris couturier Christian Dior, 42, late last year lowers skirt lengths to 12 inches above the floor, pads brassieres, unpads shoulders, adds hats, makes present wardrobes obsolete, and wins quick support from fashion magazines and the $3 billion U.S. garment industry. U.S. women resist the reactionary new fashion briefly, but then succumb and slavishly adopt not only long, full peg-top skirts, V-necks, curving waists, sloping shoulders, and frothy blouses, but also clogs, espadrilles, spike-heeled "naked sandals," and fezzes.

Paris dress designer Elsa Schiaparelli creates a sensation in the fashion world with her "shocking pink" creations. She will open a branch at New York in 1949 and gain popularity with "ice blue" and furs dyed in exotic colors.

Milwaukee's 44-year-old Harley-Davidson Motor Co. begins selling the black leather motorcycle jacket that will become a classic.

Herman Miller Furniture Co. of Zeeland, Mich., introduces the Eames side chair designed by St. Louis-born architect-film maker Charles (Ormond) Eames (Jr.), 40. The revolutionary chair made of contour-molded plywood on a frame of aluminum tubing won top prize in a 1940 Museum of Modern Art Organic Design competition, but the aluminum has been replaced by chrome-plated steel.

Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) make headlines. A rancher on a sheep spread 85 miles northwest of Roswell, N.M., comes upon rubber strips, wood sticks, tape, and heavy paper June 14. Boise, Idaho, businessman Kenneth Arnold, 32, claims to have seen nine shiny, pulsating objects flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds of up to 1,700 miles per hour while flying his two-seat plane from Chehalis to Yakima June 24. "They seemed to be alive in the center, to have the ability to change their density," he says, but the Civil Aeronautics Administration expresses doubts that "anything would be flying that fast." The Roswell Army Air Field issues a press release July 8 saying that it has recovered the wreckage of a "flying disk" and sent it to the regional Army Air Force command at Fort Worth, Texas, but a general there announces that the "wreckage" is actually a weather balloon. Other UFO sightings are reported, some 15 million Americans will claim to have seen UFOs in the next 25 years, more than half of all Americans will say that they believe in the existence of such objects, many will insist that the objects are manned by creatures from other planets, and although professional airline pilots will have more mundane explanations, charges of a "cover-up" by the federal government will persist for more than half a century (see 1997).

Ajax cleanser is introduced by Colgate-Palmolive-Peet, whose silica-sand product is more likely to scratch than feldspar cleansers such as Bon Ami and Dutch cleanser but requires less elbow grease and soon outsells its rivals (see Comet, 1956).

Reno, Nev., hails the opening of the 12-story Mapes Hotel, whose glass-enclosed Sky Room affords sweeping views of the Sierra Nevada (it will remain the tallest building in the state for 10 years). Built by Charles Mapes, the art deco structure has low ceilings and tiny rooms but is the country's first hotel designed to provide rooms, a gambling casino, and live entertainment under one roof. The Mapes will close in 1982 and be razed in early 2000.

Britain's 21-year-old Princess Royal Elizabeth is married at London November 20 to her Corfu-born Greek cousin Philip, Lieutenant Mountbatten, 26, who has been made Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh.

crime

Former gangster Al Capone dies of syphilis at Palm Island, Fla., January 25 at age 48; gangster Benjamin H. "Bugsy" Siegel is killed at his Beverly Hills home on the night of June 20 at age 41 by Chicago and New York mobsters who fire through his living-room windows (three of Meyer Lansky's henchmen that day take over the Flamingo Hotel and Casino that opened last year at Las Vegas. Siegel's girlfriend Virginia Hill returns from Europe, where she has deposited his money in banks, and tries to swallow poison); police pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury dies at London December 17 at age 70 (his book Scalpel of Scotland Yard will appear in 1952).

The U.S. Army convicts 971 soldiers of having committed acts of rape in the European Theater of Operations between January 1942 and June of this year.

architecture, real estate

New York's postwar building boom begins with a 21-story office building at 445 Park Avenue erected by Tishman Brothers.

The Kaufmann Desert House is completed at Palm Springs, Calif., to International Style designs by Joseph Neutra, whose Tremaine House goes up at Santa Barbara.

Housing developments spring up across the United States as the G.I. Bill of 1944 provides federally guaranteed loans for World War II veterans. Some developers offer houses at no money down with 40-year mortgages at 4¼ percent interest and total monthly costs of no more than $300.

Levittown opens at Hempstead, Long Island, to help satisfy the booming demand for housing fueled by World War II veterans who no longer want to live in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Brooklyn-born builder William (Jaird) Levitt, 40, and his brother break ground July 1 and crank out 20 to 30 houses per day, using a 27-step process based partly on wartime experience gained in the Seabees by building houses for the navy and partly on techniques employed earlier by California and Michigan builders. Rising on what heretofore have been potato fields, the nearly identical 7,500-square-foot Cape Cod-style tract houses (each has a yellow kitchen, two bedrooms, and an unfinished attic) are built on concrete slabs with no basements. The modest prices ($7,990 with as little as $100 down with mortgage payments of only $65 to $80 per month) include major appliances. Non-union crews assemble as many as 36 houses per day using precut materials, and they erect the mass-produced single-family houses on 60-by-100-foot lots around village greens with shops, playgrounds, and community swimming pools. Clause 25 of the standard leases bars non-white residents ("The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race. But the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted."), and although that bar will be struck down next year, and the population of the community will reach 65,440 by 1970, Levittown will remain 97.3 percent white in 1990 (137 blacks, 51,883 whites, 1,266 "other"). By 1951 there will be 17,447 Levittown houses (see 1951).

The San Juan Hilton hotel put up by Conrad Hilton begins a Puerto Rico building boom.

environment

A peasoup fog brings English traffic to a halt January 1. One of the worst in years, it covers nearly 7,000 square miles, delays trains, causes flights to be canceled, forces London bus conductors to walk along the curb shouting because drivers cannot see more than a foot or two ahead, and causes six deaths and many injuries.

Pittsburgh begins a program of huge proportions to clean up and modernize (see 1816). The city's air is so thick with smoke that street lights must often be turned on all day even in fair weather (see Donora smog, 1948).

The deadliest U.S. tornado since 1936 cuts a 170-mile path through parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas April 9, leaving 181 dead.

An explosion at Texas City, Texas, April 15 kills 581 and injures 3,500 in the nation's worst industrial accident ever. The French freighter Grandcamp loaded with as much as 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate blows up just after 9 o'clock in the morning, knocking out every window in the town of 15,000, and the shrapnel that rains down for almost a mile in every direction sets fires in tank farms and ships that burn for a week before the last one is extinguished. Estimated damage is $75 million.

Iceland's Mount Hekla volcano erupts, as it has 13 times since 1104, causing widespread destruction.

Everglades National Park is established by act of Congress; the 1.4-million-acre reserve of subtropical Florida wilderness embraces open prairies, mangrove forests, freshwater and saltwater areas, and abundant wildlife (see transportation [Tamiami Trail], 1928).

Theodore Roosevelt National Park is established in west-Central North Dakota along the Little Missouri River between Medora and Watford City. Encompassing 110 square miles, it contains a petrified forest, eroded badlands (north of Medora), Wind Canyon, the late Theodore Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch cabin, and wildlife that include bison, coyotes, prairie dogs, and many bird species.

New York City and its environs are crippled December 26 by a 25.8-inch snowfall, the worst since 1888 when 20.9 inches fell. The blizzard lasts 16 hours, but while it stops suburban trains the storm is not accompanied by the savage winds of 1888 and the drifts are not so high.

agriculture

Britain's coldest winter since 1880-81 brings January and February blizzards that pile up 20-foot drifts, block movement of food on roads and railways, and keep fishing fleets from putting out to sea. The snowstorms isolate hundreds of farms, killing more than one-fourth of the sheep and lamb flock. Two-thirds of the valuable hill wool is lost, and 30,000 head of cattle die or have to be shot. Farmers sustain £20 million in losses March 16 as a gale blows across England's Fens, knocking down trees and creating floods that destroy potatoes, root crops, and poultry flocks. Homes and farm buildings are ruined and floods make planting impossible.

Britain's Labour government puts through an Agricultural Act designed to spare farmers the insecurities that existed before the war. Further legislation will give farmers capital grants, tax concessions, and price supports that amount to a generous subsidy that will have its counterpart in France, West Germany, other Western countries, and Japan.

The rat poison Warfarin begins to fight the rodent that consumes a large portion of the world's grain production each year. University of Wisconsin biochemists Karl Paul Gerhardt Link, 46, and Harold Campbell, have studied the 1922 finding of coumarin in moldy sweet clover by Canadian Frank Schofield and discovered that while coumarin is not in itself a pathogen it becomes one when it oxidizes in moldy hay. Superior to dicoumarol patented in 1941 and named for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) that funded Link's research, the anticoagulant causes animals to bleed to death by interfering with the function of vitamin K, which enables the liver to produce the blood-clotting chemical prothrombin (see medicine, 1955).

U.S. agricultural chemical production reaches nearly 2 billion pounds, up from 100 million in 1934.

A rice-farming boom begins in the lower Mississippi valley.

food availability

Britain reduces meat rations again January 22 as worldwide food shortages continue in the wake of World War II. Crop failures later in the year exacerbate the situation, and potatoes are rationed near year's end.

U.S. sugar rationing ends June 11, but President Truman urges meatless and eggless days October 5 to conserve grain for hungry Europe, and a Friendship Train leaves Los Angeles November 8 for a cross-country tour to collect food for European relief.

The Soviet Union continues food rationing until December but exports grain despite widespread hunger at home, just as the czarist government did in 1911.

nutrition

Philippine health authorities begin the "Bataan experiment" in an effort to solve the problem of beriberi (see thiamine, 1936; 1937). The study will show that in an area where people are given rice fortified with thiamine, niacin, and iron, the incidence of beriberi drops by nearly 90 percent, while a control population has no reduction.

Nobel biochemist and nutrition pioneer Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins dies at Cambridge May 16 at age 85.

food and drink

The first commercial microwave oven is introduced by the Raytheon Co. of Waltham, Mass., whose Percy L. Spencer, now 53, walked through a room where a magnetron was being tested 2 years ago and noticed that microwaves (rapidly fluctuating electromagnetic fields) used for signal transmission would cook food (they agitated molecules of a chocolate bar in his pocket, melting it with the heat created by friction). The magnetron is an electronic tube that was developed in 1940 by John Randall and J. A. H. Boot of Birmingham University for British radar. Spencer pointed it at some popcorn kernels, which promptly popped, and at a raw egg, which cooked so quickly that it burst its shell. Raytheon's $3,000 Radarange restaurant oven cooks quickly, but the results are unappetizing (see Amana, 1967; communications [MCI], 1963).

Waterford Crystal production resumes in the Irish port city just one and a half miles from the factory opened in 1783. The Waterford name will be used on porcelain, table and bed linens, and silver flatware in addition to handcrafted crystal stemware.

Tupperware is introduced by New Hampshire-born tree surgeon-turned-inventor Earl S. (Silas) Tupper, 40, who joined an E. I. du Pont contractor 10 years ago, developed a variation on polyethylene a year later, started a company under his own name, and has patented an airtight seal that creates a partial vacuum. Tupperware bowls and canisters can be stored on their sides or upside down without leaking, and they keep foods fresh. Modeled after the lip found on most paint cans, the seal is easy to use; the containers Tupper manufactures are bendable, heat-resistant, inexpensive, odorless, and shatterproof, but traditional retail outlets find them slow movers (see Wise, 1951).

U.S. frozen orange juice concentrate sales reach 7 million cans, up from 4.8 million last year, but a glut of fresh oranges that has dropped prices from $4 per box to 50¢ and an oversupply of canned single-strength juice brings the fledgling concentrate industry to the brink of ruin.

Minute Maid Corp. has its beginnings in Vacuum Foods Co., headed by former National Research Corp. head John M. Fox, 34, whose pioneer orange concentrate producing firm has lost $371,000 in the past year (see 1945). With more than $500,000 tied up in retail packages bearing the Snow Crop label, Fox goes door to door at Hingham, Mass., handing out free cans of concentrate and the names of local grocery stores where the product may be purchased (see 1949).

Reddi-Wip is the first major U.S. aerosol food product (see everyday life, 1946). St. Louis food salesman Aaron S. "Bunny" Lapin, 33, has been supplying bakers with Sta-Whip, a wartime substitute for whipped cream made mostly from light cream and vegetable fat; he has also been offering a crude, refillable aerating gun under the name Fount-Wip, and the aerosol canister introduced last year is just what he has been looking for. Lapin advertises his aerated product as "real" whipped cream, sells it initially through milkmen, and will soon be distributing it throughout the United States and Canada, enabling him to live in the former Gloria Swanson mansion at Hollywood (see Abplanalp, 1953).

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) goes on sale for the first time under the Ac'cent label (see 1908; 1934).

The antioxidant butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) is introduced commercially in the United States to retard spoilage in foods.

Seagram's 7 Crown becomes the world's largest selling brand of whiskey (see 1934). By 1971 Seagram will be selling 7.5 million cases of 7 Crown per year, half a fifth for every American man, woman, and child.

population

America's "baby boom" generation begins as former GIs return to civilian life and start families at the rate of 10,000 new infants per day. The U.S. population reaches 144 million; the world population 2.5 billion.

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950