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Chapter 27
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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 to a small audience. There were only about 44,000 TV sets in U.S. homes, in a few cities. -
• Transistor is invented, spurring growth in computers and electronics.
The purpose of the computer was to create ballistic charts for the U.S. Navy. It was about half as long as a football field and contained about 500 miles of wiring. The Harvard-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or Mark I for short, was a electronic relay computer. It used electromagnetic signals to move mechanical parts. The machine was slow (taking 3-5 seconds per calculation) and inflexible (in that sequences of calculations could not change); but it could perform basic arithmetic -
• President Eisenhower and Congress add the words “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.
In 1954, in response to the Communist threat of the times, President Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the words "under God," creating the 31-word pledge we say today. Bellamy's daughter objected to this alteration. Today it reads: -
• Polio vaccine announced to the world by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Thomas Francis.
With these words on April 12, 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., director of the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, announced to the world that the Salk polio vaccine was up to 90% effective in preventing paralytic polio.
Dr. Francis made the announcement to a crowd of scientists and reporters at the University of Michigan's Rackham Auditorium, concluding his two-year national field trials of the poliomyelitis vaccine developed by his form -
• 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," (though the British Magnox reactor at Calder Hall was first connected to the grid on 27 August 1956, it also produced plutonium for military uses)[1] was located near the present-day Beaver Valley Nuclear Generating Station on the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, USA, about 25 miles (40 km) from Pittsburgh. The reactor went online December 2, 1957, an -
• NASA is established.
The driving force, of course, was the launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, followed by its even weightier successors. In the midst of the Cold War, a country that aspired to global preeminence could not let that challenge pass. Although the United States already had its own satellite plans in place as part of the International Geophysical Year, the Russian events spurred the Space Age, and in particular gave urgency to the founding of an American national space agency.
