1952: Events and Inventions

Jan23

February 6-7, 1952. King George VI of the United Kingdom dies at age 56, and Princess Elizabeth becomes Queen Elizabeth II. (Photo: Princess Elizabeth and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh on a rail car in Canada.)

February 26, 1952. Prime Minister Winston Churchill announces that the United Kingdom has an atomic bomb.

July 23, 1952. General Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, the real power behind the coup, bring about the overthrow of King Farouk of Egypt. King Farouk, known as “The Playboy King”, abdicates and sails away on his luxury yacht.

August 11, 1952. The Jordanian army forces King Talal to resign due to mental illness; he is succeeded by his son King Hussein of Jordan, age 16.

September 2, 1952. Dr. C. Walton Lillehei and Dr. F. John Lewis perform the first open-heart surgery at the University of Minnesota.

October 20, 1952. The Uk declares a state of emergency and martial law in Kenya due to the Mau Mau uprising.

November 1, 1952. A small island off Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean is the site of a U.S. nuclear test explosion of the new hydrogen bomb. It is believed that Soviet scientists will soon produce their own H-bomb.

November 4, 1952. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower defeats Democrat Adlai Stevenson to become the president of the United States.

December 10, 1952. Dr. Albert Schweitzer receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a doctor in French Equitorial Africa. He intends to use the prize money to set up a leper colony.

In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation’s history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis. Although a polio vaccine is under development by Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh, and another by Dr. Albert Sabin in Cincinnati, a polio vaccine will not be announced until 1955 nor widely administered until the late 1950’s/early 1960’s. I was born in 1957, and I remember being taken to the health clinic at City Hall to get my polio vaccination and also a smallpox vaccination when I was about four years old. I’m sure my mom and other parents of her generation were quite thankful for the protection of a vaccine against the double scourges of smallpox and polio. (Photo: An “iron lung” was used to help some polio victims breathe.)

1951: Events and Inventions

Jan21

January 18, 1951. Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul for the second time. United Nations forces recapture Seoul in March.

March 6, 1951. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Jewish American communists, go on trial for passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. They are convicted and sentenced to death and later executed in 1953.

April 11, 1951. U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieves General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, a popular war hero of World War II and the commander of United Nations forces fighting in the Korean War, of command in Korea for threatening to invade China against U.S. policy.
Truman: “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a b—, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

May, 1951. People of color are removed from the election rolls in South Africa and therefore not allowed to vote.

May 9, 1951. The first thermonuclear weapon is tested on Enewetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, by the United States.

June 14, 1951. UNIVAC, the world’s most advanced digital computing machine, is dedicated and installed in the U.S. Census Bureau in Philadelphia. UNIVAC uses vacuum tubes and occupies an entire room, 35.5 square meters of floor space. It can read 7200 digits per second.

July 5, 1951. William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain announce the invention of the junction transistor.

July 20, 1951. King Abdullah I of Jordan is assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem.

September 9, 1951. Chinese communist forces invade Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

October 26, 1951. Winston Churchill is re-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in a general election which sees the defeat of Clement Attlee’s Labour government after six years in power.

1948: Events and Inventions

Jan11

January 30, 1948. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi is assassinated by a fanatical Hindu man while Gandhi is a prayer meeting in New Delhi. All India mourns.

February 25, 1948. Communists seize power in Czechoslovakia.

May 14, 1948. Jewish leaders Chaim Weitzmann and David Ben-Gurion declare the independence of the new Jewish state of Israel.

June 23, 1948. The Soviet Union blockades road and rail links to the city of Berlin located inside the Soviet zone of Germany. On June 30, U.S. planes, carrying supplies for besieged Berlin, land in the city delivering 2500 tons of much-needed food.

June, 1948. Columbia Records introduces the first long-playing commercial vinyl records.

July 1, 1948. Yugoslav Communist Marshal Tito provokes the Soviet Union into expelling Yugoslavia from the Cominform (the international organization of communist parties) in Tito’s determination to remain independent from Soviet control.

August, 1948. The Republic of South Korea is proclaimed in Seoul with Syngham Rhee as president.

September, 1948. Communist leader Kim Il Sung proclaims the People’s Republic of North Korea in Pyongyang.

October 22, 1948. Chester Carlson and Haloid Corporation announce the invention of “xerography”, electrophotography. Haloid Corp. will change its name later to Xerox Corp., and it will be 1960 before the first commercial automatic copier is released by Xerox.

December, 1948. In Switzerland, Georges de Mestral invents Velcro, a new clothes fastener.

Christmas in England, 1861

Dec14

From Fallen Grace by Mary Hooper. Semicolon review here. Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coberg and Gotha, died on December 14, 1861. Victoria wore black in mourning for him for the rest of her life, forty more years, and “Albert’s rooms in all his houses were kept as they had been, even with hot water brought in the morning, and linen and towels changed daily.”

It was the day of Prince Albert’s funeral and a good proportion of the British Isles had come to a complete halt. Shop owners had been hoping that general trade, always slow in December and almost at a standstill since the death of the Prince, might have improved because of the festive season, but it seemed that Christmas had been cancelled that year and no one was inclined to be merry. In London, and in Windsor especially—where the funeral service was to be held in St. George’s Chapel—there was an aspect of the most profound gloom, with shops closed, work suspended, each curtain in every house drown across and the streets deserted. Everyone seen outside, however low or high, wore some symbol of mourning, and in the great churches across the land the tolling bell sounded.

Christmas in England, 1939

Dec6

George VI, King of England (the one who is featured in the movie The King’s Speech) quoted (the portion in bold print) from the following poem in his Christmas speech to the British nation in December, 1939.

God Knows by Minnie Louise Haskins

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

So heart be still:
What need our little life
Our human life to know,
If God hath comprehension?
In all the dizzy strife
Of things both high and low,
God hideth His intention.
God knows. His will
Is best. The stretch of years
Which wind ahead, so dim
To our imperfect vision,
Are clear to God. Our fears
Are premature; In Him,
All time hath full provision.
Then rest: until
God moves to lift the veil
From our impatient eyes,
When, as the sweeter features
Of Life’s stern face we hail,
Fair beyond all surmise
God’s thought around His creatures
Our mind shall fill.

The photo is a 1942 picture of King George VI, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Queen Elizabeth, George’s wife.

1940: Events and Inventions

Nov27

April 9, 1940. Germany invades Denmark and Norway, claiming that the invasion is purely defensive.

May 10, 1940. German forces invade Holland and Belgium with their Blitzkrieg or “lightning war”. Both countries have no choice but to surrender. The Germans continue on to France.

May 10, 1940. Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain, following Neville Chamberlain’s resignation. On May 13, Churchill makes a famous speech in which he tells the House of Commons and the British people:

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.

June 4, 1940. British forces trapped in France flee from Dunkirk. Under constant German bombardment, warships of the Royal Navy and hundreds of smaller vessels manned by volunteers from the coastal villages of Britain rescue nearly 300,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers from the beaches and ferry them to safety in England.

June 10, 1940. Mussolini announces that Italy will join forces with Germany; Roosevelt calls the announcement a stab in the back.

The ending to another famous Churchill speech, delivered to the House of Commons on June 18, 1940:

June 22, 1940. The French surrender to the German Blitzkrieg invasion. German troops entered Paris on June 14th, and now Hitler demands that the French sign an armistice in the same railroad car in which the Germans surrendered to the Allies in November 1918.

July 10, 1940. French Marshall Henri Petain establishes a fascist and authoritarian government answering to the Nazis in Vichy, France. France is no longer a republic.

July-September, 1940. The Battle of Britain. The German Luftwaffe sends 1000 planes daily to bomb British ports, shipping, RAF bases, and British radar installations. The Royal Air Force effectively counters the German raids in the air with the help of warnings from the British radar system. Churchill says of the Battle of Britain and the brave RAF pilots, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

August 21, 1941. Exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky is assassinated with an ice pick by Ramon Mercader in Mexico City.

September 24-27, 1940. Japanese aircraft from aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin attack French positions on the coast of French Indochina (Vietnam and Cambodia). The United States, Britain, and the Dutch government in exile respond to Japanese expansionism by placing an oil, iron ore, and steel embargo on Japan.

September 27, 1940. The Tripartite Pact is signed in Berlin, Germany, establishing the Axis Powers of World War II. The pact was signed by representatives of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The three nations agree to a ten-year alliance. Later, other countries sign the pact, including Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Thailand.

October-November, 1940. Seventy people are dying every day, mainly from starvation, in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Occupying Nazi troops continue to herd all Jewish Poles into the 1.3 square mile area; eventually over 400,000 Jews will be contained in the Warsaw ghetto. The Nazis close the Warsaw Ghetto to the outside world on November 16, 1940 by building a wall topped with barbed wire, and deploying armed guards. Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18 tells the story (in fiction)of the Warsaw Ghetto and its inhabitants and their resistance to the Nazi persecution.

1939: Events and Inventions

Nov25

January 26, 1939. Franco’s Spanish Nationalist troops, aided by Italy, take Barcelona.

January 28, 1939. German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman find a way to bombard uranium atoms with neutrons until the atoms split, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process. Hahn calls the discovery “nuclear fission”. It may be possible to use the energy produced by this process to make a bomb that will have immense destructive power.

March, 1939. Swiss company Nestle launches a new product in the United Kingdom, instant coffee.

March 15, 1939. Hitler enters Prague, Czechoslovakia as the German army takes over the remainder of the country.

August 23, 1939. Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin sign a non-aggression pact and agree to divide Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, eastern Poland and Bessarabia (today Moldova), and the northeast province of Romania are to go to the Soviet Union; Lithuania and western Poland are to belong to Germany.

September 1, 1939. Germany invades Poland. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Spain and Ireland declare their neutrality. Later in September U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt announces that the U.S. will also remain neutral in the war.

September 3, 1939. The United Kingdom, France, New Zealand and Australia declare war on Germany.

September 17, 1939. The Soviet Union invades Poland and then occupies eastern Polish territories.

September 28-29, 1939. Poland surrenders to Germany.

October 11, 1939. Manhattan Project. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is presented a letter signed by Albert Einstein, urging the United States to rapidly develop the atomic bomb.

November 30, 1939. Soviet forces of over a million troops attack Finland and reach the Mannerheim Line, starting the war with Finland.

1936: Events and Inventions

Nov11

January 28, 1936. King George V of England dies, leaving his oldest son Edward to become king.

February 26, 1936. The “People’s Car”, Volkswagen, is born. Hitler inaugurates the first factory to build the cars that he believes will do for Germany what Henry Ford’s automobiles did for the United States, make ordinary Germans, car owners and drivers.

March 7, 1936. In violation of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler’s troops march into the Rhineland, territory that was ceded by Germany to France after World War I. Hitler is gambling that the French will not want to go to war over the Rhineland, and they don’t. Hitler proposes a new treaty that will “guarantee peace for the next 25 years.”

April 28, 1936. Prince Farouk becomes King of Egypt, following the death of his father.

April 30, 1936. The Italian army takes Addis Ababa, the capital of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), crushing the forces of Haile Selassie, the current ruler of Ethiopia. The Italian air force drops mustard gas on the civilians and military forces in order to pacify the capital. By May 9th, Mussolini boasts, “Italy at last has her empire. It is a Fascist empire because it bears the indestructible sign of the will and power of Rome.” (Fascism, according to my dictionary, “tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.”)

June 8, 1936. New French Premier Leon Blum, a socialist, promises the French people, suffering from the worldwide economic depression, pay raises, a 40-hour work week, two weeks per year of paid vacation, collective bargaining rights, and binding arbitration in labor disputes.

July, 1936. The giant German airship, Hindenburg, crosses the Atlantic in a record time of 46 hours.

July 19, 1936. Generalissimo Francisco Franco lands Fascist troops in Cadiz coming from Morocco to take over the Spanish government. Franco’s troops move through Spain to Madrid, the capital, and tales of horrible atrocities are told from both sides of the civil war. In Barcelona and Madrid, there are reports of assassinations and house searches for rebels and arms. In Badajoz in August Fascist soldiers line Loyalists (Republicans) up against a wall and shoot them after a Fascist victory.

October, 1936. The $120 million Hoover Dam opens on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona.

December 11, 1936. King Edward VIII of England abdicates the throne so that he can marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American. The king will be succeeded by his younger brother, Albert George (George VI). (Watch the Academy Award-winning movie, The King’s Speech, to see a dramatized version of the year’s events in regard to the British monarchy and the effects of those events on younger brother Albert George, “Bertie”. It’s a wonderfully inspiring movie.)

1934: Movies

Nov11

Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, becomes a smash hit and the first of Capra’s great screen classics. It Happened One Night is the first film to win all 5 of the major Academy Awards â€“ Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. Gable and Colbert receive their only Oscars for this film.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck makes his first appearance in the cartoon, The Little Wise Hen.

Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man detective thriller novel becomes a movie, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles.

In Germany, Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film director, makes a documentary about the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party titled Triumph of the Will. The film made her famous because of the innovative techniques she used: moving cameras, the use of long focus lenses to create a distorted perspective, aerial photography, and revolutionary approach to the use of music and cinematography. It has become an example of excellent filmmaking used as propaganda.

You can watch the entire movie on youtube. I watched the first half hour of the nearly two hour film, and it’s worth seeing to begin to understand what a phenomenon, a cult celebrity, Hitler had already become by 1934. In the movie Hitler comes to Nuremberg out of the clouds (in an airplane), like a god. And the people, women and children mostly, line the streets and shout out their praise and adulation. The music is joyful and triumphant. Night falls on a waiting, expectant crowd who are only kept from mobbing the building where Hitler has come to stay by brown-shirted Nazi guards.

Then, dawn breaks upon rows and rows of tents where the strong young Aryan boys and men come out and meet the day. They engage in sporting contests, running and wrestling. (It is sobering to think of how many of those boys would be dead within ten years.) Later in the film, Hitler reviews rank upon rank of the “German Labor Service”, young men who have “enlisted” to build the new Germany. There is martial singing, and shouting, and fireworks, and the young men are exhorted to “work for the Fuhrer.”

Amazing stuff.

Riefenstahl wrote in her memoir about hearing Hitler speak for the first time: “”I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.” She was, indeed, a Nazi true believer, as were many, many of the German people.

1920: Events and Inventions

Oct7

January 16, 1920. Prohibition officially takes effect in the United States. The sale of alcohol is banned in an attempt to end alcohol related deaths and abuse.

January, 1920. The newly formed League of Nations meets in Paris, France. The League consists of 29 countries, and although it is the brainchild of American president Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. is not a member since the U.S. Senate has not yet ratified the Treaty of Versailles. On January 19 the Senate votes against joining the League of Nations.

April-October, 1920. In the Polish-Soviet War the Poles and the Bolsheviks (Communist Russians) fight over territory and ideology. The Treaty of Versailles had not defined the frontiers between Poland and Soviet Russia, and the revolution in Russia created turmoil with the Bolsheviks wanting to spread communism and assist the communist revolution in neighboring countries. The Polish victory secured Polish independence and made the Bolsheviks abandon their cause of international communist revolution.

August 26, 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is passed, giving women the right to vote in national elections, including the presidential election in November, 1920.

September, 1920. The first domestic radio sets come to stores in the United States; a Westinghouse radio costs $10.00.

September, 1920. Indian nationalist Mohandas Ghandi launches a peaceful noncooperation movement against British rule in India.

November, 1920. Civil war ends in Russia as the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, achieves victory for the Bolsheviks.

November 21, 1920. Bloody Sunday: British forces open fire on spectators and players during a football match in Dublin’s Croke Park, killing 14 Irish civilians. This violence follows the assassinations of 12 British agents by the Irish Republican Army in an earlier attack elsewhere. The country has been in a state of insurrection since Britain declared its intention to split Ireland into two states, predominantly Catholic southern Ireland and mostly Protestant Northern Ireland.

December 11, 1920. Martial law is declared in Ireland.

Slang of the 1920’s. Can you translate the terms bearcat, copacetic, cheaters, flivver, speakeasy, jitney, hooch, ducky, palooka, ritzy?

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

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