Science+and+Technology

The technology intrduced in the 1950s was incredible. Not only were the discoveries and inventions in themselves astounding, but the speed in which science had brought about them was even more so. The production of the atomic bomb, obviously the greatest of this time period, possibly the greatest of all time periods to this date, showed how a large team of scientists could work together to produce a very big solution to a very big problem. More and more people were turning to scientists to solve their problems. A polio vaccine was brought about in 1955, ending what used to be something so dreadful and alot more common but no longer is thanks to this vaccine. TV's were available for sale and everyone could be entertained and informed of local, national, and international events right in their living room. Highways were formed by the signing of The Federal Highway Act, giving travellers faster more convenient routes. Explorer 1 successfully orbits the earth in 1958, the first American satilite to do so. The National Airlines was formed, the first domestic jet-airline service.

TV's were available for sale and everyone could be entertained and informed of local, national, and international events right in their living room. Television became a dominate mass media. As people brought them into their homes, people started watching more TV. In the early 50's, the hours of children watched Tv increaced. As TV bacame popular, black and white televisions and colored tv's was in style. People said if you had a colored TV, you were rich. (mortimer)

In 1950, Charly Adama had created a video games called "Bouncing Ball" on the first computer that ever display real time video. This computer was capable of displaying real time text and graphics on a video terminal. The video terminal was a large oscilloscope screen. Scienceists had called this computer the Whirlwind. The Whirlwind was the first computer to use core memory. This memory helped permanently stor data on magnets within a wire grid. (mortimer)

Was the Eisenhower era the best of times for science, or the worst? It's true that the science of the Fifties gave us the most awful weapon ever developed. The hydrogen bomb cast the shadow of nuclear Armageddon over the world. But research in other areas, often also spurred by military concerns, brought advances that directly affected the daily lives of people across the globe. In medicine and electronics, innovations that came to fruition in the Fifties offered mankind tremendous benefits… starting with the computer you're staring at right now. (Wilson)

Even as scientists were working on the original atomic bomb, which the US dropped on Japan to end World War II, they were also looking into the possibility of an even more powerful explosive device, known as the "Super" or hydrogen bomb. The atomic bomb's energy came from fission, the splitting of the atom; the Super instead used the energy released when atoms fused together, as they do inside stars. Fusion only occurs at temperatures so high that they never occur on earth. But scientists realized that a fission bomb could create those kinds of temperatures. If they could find a way to maintain this heat long enough to set off fusion, they could dramatically multiply the explosive force of the bomb; a Super could be thousands of times more powerful than the A-bombs that ruined Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. (Wilson)

By 1 November 1952, researchers were ready to explode the first Super, now known more officially as the hydrogen bomb. The result of the test, conducted at Eniwetok Atoll in a remote location in the South Pacific, exceeded all expectations. The fireball let loose was five miles high and four miles wide. Eniwetok Atoll was simply gone, leaving only a deep crater in the seabed. Less than a year later, on 12 August 953, the Soviets set off an H-bomb of their own in Siberia. The Americans and Russians, along with the British and French, would continue to test ever more sophisticated bombs through the rest of the 1950s. (Wilson)

1950

 * Commercial color transmission of CBS television "Color-cast," starring Ed Sullivan and Arthur Godfrey.
 * The Sulzer weaving machine begins modern commercial production of cloth using an automatic loom.
 * In January, inventor George Eastman develops a method to use regular movie cameras to produce color movies. Before this, only Technicolor cameras produced color movies.
 * On March 29, RCA demonstrates the first electronic color television tube.
 * In November, dairy scientists implant an embryo in the uterus of a cow at the University of Wisconsin.

1951
(added by **Courtright**)
 * The first 3-D movies are produced.
 * The first transcontinental television transmission is broadcast from the United States.
 * In February, American mathematician Dirk Brouwer uses a computer to predict the orbits of the nine planets in our solar system.