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CHAPTER 27, THE POSTWAR YEARS AT HOME
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Harry Truman becomes the first president to address the nation on TV from the White House
President Harry S. Truman delivered the first televised presidential address from the White House. It was only to a limited audience though. Television was still in its infancy.There were only about 44,000 TV sets in U.S. homes, concentrated in a few cities, compared with some 40 million radios. -
Transistor is invented, spurring growth in computers and electronics
The transistor was invented in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories by physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. The computer was not high on the list of potential applications for this tiny device at first. When the first computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s, not many scientists saw in them the seeds of a technology that would in a few decades come to permeate almost every sphere of human life. -
President Eisenhower and Congress add the words “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance
In 1954, President Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the words "under God,". That created the 31-word pledge we say today. It was in response to the Communist threat of the times. -
Polio vaccine announced to the world by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Thomas Francis
Dr. Francis made the announcement to a crowd of scientists and reporters at the University of Michigan's Rackham Auditorium. Jonas Salk. Francis was chair of the School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology. That is where Salk did postgraduate training. -
The first nuclear power plant in the U.S. goes online at Shippingport, Pa
The Shippingport Atomic Power Station, "the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses," It was located in Beaver Valley Nuclear Generating Station on the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, Shippingport was created and operated under the auspices of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. -
NASA is established
NASA was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958. It replaced the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The agency became operational on October 1, 1958. U.S. space exploration efforts have since been led by NASA.
