50 Fun Facts About 1948

Which newspaper ran the mistaken headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman' after the 1948 US presidential election?

The Chicago Daily Tribune went to press early because its printers were on strike, before most states had reported. A grinning Truman held a copy aloft at St. Louis Union Station.

Which independence leader was shot by Nathuram Godse on his way to a New Delhi prayer meeting in January 1948?

Mahatma Gandhi was 78 and walking to his evening multi-faith prayers at Birla House when three bullets struck him at point-blank range. The mansion is now a memorial.

Which company's instant camera, invented by Edwin Land, first went on sale in a Boston store in November 1948?

Polaroid put 57 of its Land Cameras on sale at Jordan Marsh before Christmas. Each could take and develop a picture in a minute or less.

Which country declared independence on 14 May 1948, hours before a British Mandate expired at midnight?

Israel was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion at the Tel Aviv Museum that afternoon. The United States recognised the new state eleven minutes after midnight.

Which baseball legend, nicknamed the Sultan of Swat, died of cancer in New York in August 1948, aged 53?

Babe Ruth lay in an open casket at Yankee Stadium for two days while thousands of fans filed past. The Yankees had retired his number 3 that same year.

Which motorsport body did Bill France Sr. found in February 1948 after meetings at Daytona Beach's Streamline Hotel?

NASCAR traces its roots to Prohibition-era moonshine runners, who began racing one another for pride. The founding talks started in the hotel's Ebony Bar.

Which word game got its lasting name in 1948, when James Brunot bought the rights from its architect inventor?

Scrabble had been sold as Criss-Crosswords, and its new name is a real word meaning to scratch frantically. Parker Brothers was among the big makers that had turned the game down.

Which blockaded city did American and British planes keep supplied with food and coal from June 1948?

Berlin's children got sweets too: pilot Gail Halvorsen dropped chocolate bars on handkerchief parachutes, and thank-you mail soon arrived for 'The Chocolate Flier'.

Which burger chain's founding brothers rebuilt their San Bernardino drive-in around a nine-item menu in 1948?

McDonald's fired its 20 carhops and swapped plates for paper wrappers, selling 15-cent hamburgers from a walk-up window. The method became known as the Speedee Service System.

Which city hosted the 1948 Olympics, nicknamed the Austerity Games because of post-war rationing?

London built no new venues and housed athletes in existing accommodation instead of an Olympic Village. Germany and Japan were not invited.

Which Black Sabbath frontman, dubbed the Prince of Darkness, was born in December 1948 and raised in Aston, Birmingham?

Ozzy Osbourne sang on the band's first eight studio albums before being sacked in 1979 over his drinking and drug use. He went on to sell more than 100 million albums.

Which Fleetwood Mac singer, writer of 'Dreams' and 'Landslide', was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in May 1948?

Stevie Nicks became the first woman inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with the band in 1998 and as a solo artist in 2019.

Which Pulp Fiction star, born in Washington, D.C., in December 1948, grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee?

Samuel L. Jackson served as an usher at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral in Atlanta in 1968. A year later he helped hold his college's trustees hostage to demand reforms.

Which US vice president, later a Nobel Peace Prize winner for climate activism, was born in March 1948?

Al Gore shared the 2007 prize with the IPCC for his work on climate change. A politician's son, he was raised between Tennessee and Washington, D.C.

Which composer of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera was born in March 1948 to an organist father and violinist mother?

Andrew Lloyd Webber was playing piano and violin at three and composing by the age of six. At nine he wrote a suite of six pieces.

Which 'Hot Stuff' singer, known as the Queen of Disco, was born in Boston on New Year's Eve 1948?

Donna Summer left for Munich in 1968 to join the German production of the musical Hair. She spent several years living, acting and singing there before disco made her a star.

Which country's National Party, led by cleric D. F. Malan, ousted wartime leader Jan Smuts in a May 1948 election?

South Africa's nationalists called their programme apartheid and went on to rule for 46 years. The party Smuts led had won just under half of the votes cast.

Which author finished the manuscript of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Scottish island of Jura in late 1948?

George Orwell posted the finished manuscript to his publisher on 4 December 1948 and left his remote farmhouse for good a month later. The book came out the following June.

In which European city did the UN adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948?

Paris hosted that session of the General Assembly at the Palais de Chaillot. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the committee that drafted the text.

Which 1948 Hitchcock thriller, starring James Stewart, was edited to look like just four long unbroken shots?

Rope was the director's first Technicolor film and plays out in real time. Stewart found the shoot exasperating, complaining that the camera was being rehearsed, not the actors.

Which actor played the gold prospector Fred C. Dobbs in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?

Humphrey Bogart was directed by John Huston, whose father Walter co-starred. It was the first time a father and son both won Oscars for the same film.

Which Laurence Olivier film of 1948 was the first British production to win the Best Picture Oscar?

Hamlet also won Olivier the Best Actor award, though purists complained that he had cut an hour and a half from Shakespeare's four-hour play.

Which New York entertainment columnist began hosting the CBS variety show Toast of the Town in June 1948?

Ed Sullivan's first broadcast featured Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, plus Rodgers and Hammerstein previewing their next musical. The show ran until 1971.

Which aviation pioneer, who flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903, died in January 1948, decades after his brother and partner?

Orville Wright's executors sold the original Flyer to the Smithsonian for one dollar later that year. It had spent years on loan to a museum in Britain.

Which European aid programme, proposed at Harvard by a US Secretary of State, became law in April 1948?

The Marshall Plan was offered to the Soviet Union and its allies as well, but they refused it under Soviet pressure. Moscow launched its own rival scheme instead.

Which former Soviet Red Army officer became North Korea's first premier in September 1948?

Kim Il Sung had landed at the port of Wonsan in 1945 after 26 years in exile. The Soviet Union designated him premier on 9 September.

Which Central American country abolished its army in December 1948 after a brief civil war?

Costa Rica's rebel leader José Figueres Ferrer said he was inspired to disarm by 'The Outline of History', a book he had read as a student at MIT.

Which wartime prime minister of Japan was hanged in December 1948 after the Tokyo war crimes trials?

Hideki Tojo had shot himself in the chest when American soldiers surrounded his house in 1945. He missed his heart and was resuscitated by the troops sent to arrest him.

At which royal residence was the future King Charles III born by caesarean section in November 1948?

Buckingham Palace was also where he was christened a month later, in the Music Room. He was the first child of the future Queen Elizabeth II.

Which team won the 1948 World Series in six games, with 42-year-old rookie Satchel Paige on its pitching staff?

The Cleveland Indians got there by beating the Red Sox in a one-game playoff for the pennant, which spoiled the chance of an all-Boston World Series.

Which When Harry Met Sally star and frequent Oscars host was born in Manhattan in March 1948?

Billy Crystal spent his first years in the Bronx before his family moved to Long Beach on Long Island. He first hosted the Academy Awards in 1990.

Which cheese-flavoured snack did Fritos creator Charles Elmer Doolin invent in a Dallas test kitchen in 1948?

Cheetos sold so fast that Doolin lacked the capacity for a nationwide launch. Their success helped bring about his firm's 1961 merger with H.W. Lay & Company.

Which sportswear brand did Rudolf Dassler found in 1948 after quitting the shoe firm he ran with his brother?

Puma was first registered as Ruda, from the opening letters of Rudolf Dassler's names. His brother Adi used the same trick to name the rival firm he set up.

Which sports car maker built its first model, the 356, in a small sawmill in Gmünd, Austria, in 1948?

Porsche built only about 50 cars at Gmünd. Like its cousin the Volkswagen Beetle, the 356 had an air-cooled engine mounted at the rear.

Which Japanese company, incorporated in September 1948, began by fitting war-surplus generator engines to bicycles?

Honda started with 12 men in a tiny shack and 500 two-stroke engines built to power army radios. When the supply ran out, it began making its own copy of the engine.

Which Indiana University zoologist was lead author of the 1948 report 'Sexual Behavior in the Human Male'?

Alfred Kinsey had founded his Institute for Sex Research a year earlier. The book introduced the scale of sexual orientation that still carries his name.

Which St. Louis-born poet of 'The Waste Land' won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature?

T. S. Eliot was honoured for his 'outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry'. He had moved to England at 25 and settled there for good.

Which record label launched the 33⅓ rpm long-playing album in 1948, fitting 23 minutes of music on each side?

Columbia's LP replaced noisy shellac discs that spun at 78 rpm and held under five minutes a side. Rival RCA Victor answered with the seven-inch 45.

Which South Carolina governor ran for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate and won four states?

Strom Thurmond took over a million votes. He later spent decades in the Senate, where his 1957 filibuster against a civil rights bill lasted 24 hours and 18 minutes.

Which singer took 'Nature Boy', written by a man found living under the Hollywood Sign, to number one in 1948?

Nat King Cole's recording spent 15 weeks on the Billboard pop charts and sold over a million copies, which helped to establish his solo career.

Which Calumet Farm colt, later the first horse to earn a million dollars, won the US Triple Crown in 1948?

Citation won 16 races in a row. Jockey Eddie Arcaro was hired for the ride only after the colt's first rider drowned on a fishing trip off the Florida Keys.

Which Bell Labs mathematician founded information theory with a 1948 paper, 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication'?

Claude Shannon formally introduced the term 'bit' in the paper. Scientific American later called it the Magna Carta of the Information Age.

Which country, led by Josip Broz Tito, was expelled from the Soviet-run Cominform in 1948?

Yugoslavia had been held up by the Soviets as a model for the Eastern Bloc only months before. Tito was the only leader to defy Moscow's control during Stalin's lifetime.

Which Italian director cast a factory worker as the lead in his 1948 neorealist film Bicycle Thieves?

Vittorio De Sica shot only on location and used only untrained actors. In 1952 a Sight & Sound poll of film-makers and critics named it the greatest film of all time.

Which 17-year-old Californian won the decathlon at the 1948 Olympics, months after first taking up the event?

Bob Mathias became the youngest man to win an Olympic track and field gold medal. He won the title again four years later and went on to serve four terms in Congress.

Which Hollywood studio gave its name to the 1948 Supreme Court ruling against studios owning theater chains?

The Paramount Decision also condemned block booking and outlawed the blind buying of unseen films. It is credited with ending the old Hollywood studio system.

Which English city's university ran the first electronic stored-program computer, nicknamed 'Baby', in June 1948?

Manchester's machine could only subtract and negate, so its first program found a number's highest divisor by repeated subtraction, a slow job chosen to prove it reliable.

Which 30-year-old mother of two, nicknamed the Flying Housewife, won four athletics golds at the 1948 Olympics?

Fanny Blankers-Koen won the 100 m, 200 m, 80 m hurdles and sprint relay. During the war years she had also set world records in the long jump and the high jump.

Which former State Department official did Whittaker Chambers name as a secret communist in August 1948?

Alger Hiss denied the charge and sued Chambers for libel. Because the time limit for an espionage prosecution had run out, he was convicted of perjury instead in 1950.

Which Welsh health minister, a coal miner's son, launched Britain's National Health Service in July 1948?

Aneurin Bevan had left school at 14. His new service took over more than 2,500 hospitals despite resistance from the British Medical Association.