50 Fun Facts About 1940s and 1950s

Which toy was born when naval engineer Richard James watched a spring knocked off a shelf keep moving?

Slinky sold its first 400 units in 90 minutes when it was demonstrated at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in November 1945. Each one cost $1.

Which garment did Louis Réard unveil in Paris in 1946, hiring a nude dancer when no fashion model would wear it?

Bikini was the name of the Pacific atoll where the United States had tested a nuclear bomb four days earlier. The dancer, Micheline Bernardini, received 50,000 fan letters.

Which doll did Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler launch in 1959 after watching her daughter play with paper dolls?

Barbie was modelled on Bild Lilli, a German doll Handler came across on a trip to Europe in 1956. Her daughter had liked giving paper dolls adult roles, which the baby dolls of the day did not allow.

Which kitchen appliance grew out of Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer noticing a candy bar melting in his pocket?

Microwave oven cooking began with popcorn, the first food Spencer heated on purpose. The second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters.

Which 1950s sitcom drew more viewers for the birth of Little Ricky than Eisenhower's inauguration did the next morning?

I Love Lucy was also the first scripted television show filmed on 35 mm film in front of a studio audience. Nearly 72% of American sets were tuned in for the birth.

Which Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman broke baseball's color line in 1947 and won the first Rookie of the Year award?

Jackie Robinson wore number 42, which Major League Baseball retired across every team in 1997. No professional athlete in any sport had been honoured that way before.

Which singer did The Ed Sullivan Show film only down to the waist during a January 1957 appearance?

Elvis Presley was paid an unprecedented $50,000 for three Sullivan appearances, even though the host had earlier judged him unsuitable for family audiences.

Which theme park's televised 1955 opening saw thousands of guests get in on counterfeit tickets or over the fence?

Disneyland's first day of operation became known as Black Sunday. Of the 28,000 people who turned up in Anaheim, California, only about half had been invited.

Which Montgomery seamstress was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger?

Rosa Parks was not the first: 15-year-old student Claudette Colvin and other Black Montgomerians had already been arrested for the same refusal. Her case set off a bus boycott.

Which naval base's surprise bombing by Japan sank the battleship USS Arizona and brought America into World War II?

Pearl Harbor saw all eight US battleships present damaged and four sunk, yet six of the eight were repaired and returned to service during the war.

Which teenager's diary of two years hiding in a secret Amsterdam annex was published by her father in 1947?

Anne Frank hid with her family behind a bookcase in the building where her father Otto worked. Her diary has since been translated into more than 70 languages.

Which Humphrey Bogart film was rushed into release in 1942 to cash in on the Allied invasion of North Africa?

Casablanca premiered in New York just weeks after Allied troops captured the Moroccan city itself. It went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Which Soviet spacecraft, a polished metal sphere launched in October 1957, set off the Space Race?

Sputnik 1 was only 58 cm across, yet amateur radio operators could easily pick up its signal as it passed overhead. Its batteries ran down after three weeks.

Which Wham-O toy, based on a bamboo version used by Australian children, sold 25 million in under four months of 1958?

Hula hoop sales passed 100 million within two years of the 1958 craze. The name came from the Hawaiian hula dance.

Which actress appeared, without her consent, on the cover of the first issue of Playboy in December 1953?

Marilyn Monroe had posed nude for a calendar in 1949, before she was famous, signing herself Mona Monroe. Hugh Hefner ran one of those pictures as the centerfold; the cover was a 1952 parade photograph.

Which four-wheel-drive vehicle, built by Willys-Overland and Ford for the US Army, became a civilian brand in 1945?

Jeep was Army slang before the war, but the light 4×4 that entered production in 1941 made the name its own. The first civilian models were built in Toledo, Ohio.

Which wartime figure began as a 1942 hit song and came to stand for women working in American factories?

Rosie the Riveter reached the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, painted by Norman Rockwell in a pose borrowed from Michelangelo's Prophet Isaiah.

Which actor earned two posthumous Oscar nominations after dying in a 1955 car accident at the age of 24?

James Dean made just three major films: East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. The nominations came for the first and the last of them.

Which hamburger chain did milkshake-mixer salesman Ray Kroc begin franchising from Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955?

McDonald's began in 1940 as a single restaurant run by brothers Richard and Maurice in San Bernardino, California. Kroc first visited to see why they were making so many milkshakes.

Which crooner's 1942 recording of White Christmas became the world's best-selling single, at over 50 million copies?

Bing Crosby recorded the song in just 18 minutes for the musical film Holiday Inn. It went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Which New Zealander was first confirmed to reach Mount Everest's summit, alongside Tenzing Norgay, in May 1953?

Edmund Hillary's news reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the press called it a coronation gift.

Which virologist chose not to patent or profit from the polio vaccine whose success was announced in April 1955?

Jonas Salk told broadcaster Ed Murrow that the patent belonged to the people. Giving up any profit was meant to spread the vaccine as widely as possible around the world.

Which French region's beaches were the target of D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history, on 6 June 1944?

Normandy was reached first from the air: 24,000 American, British and Canadian airborne troops began landing shortly after midnight, hours before the beach assault.

Which brand of plastic kitchen containers, introduced in 1946, was sold mostly through home parties run by Brownie Wise?

Tupperware made Brownie Wise, a former Stanley Home Products saleswoman, its vice president of marketing in 1951. The first container that Earl Tupper developed was bell-shaped.

Which comic strip did Charles Schulz launch in October 1950 under a title he said he had always hated?

Peanuts was the syndicate's choice of name: Schulz had sold the strip as Li'l Folks, a title that turned out to have been used before.

Which blockaded city did American and British aircraft supply with food and fuel for nearly a year from June 1948?

Berlin received more than 200,000 flights during the airlift. Some crews also dropped candy to German children, which earned the aircraft the nickname raisin bombers.

Which frontman of the Crickets died with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in a February 1959 plane crash?

Buddy Holly was only 22 when the plane came down soon after takeoff. Valens was aboard because a guitarist in the touring band had flipped a coin with him for the seat.

Which James Stewart film sold poorly in 1946 but became a Christmas classic once its copyright lapsed in 1974?

It's a Wonderful Life needed $6.3 million to break even and came nowhere close. Once stations could broadcast it without paying royalties, it turned into a seasonal fixture.

Which author wrote The Cat in the Hat with just 236 different words, as a livelier rival to Dick and Jane primers?

Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Geisel, said he built the story on the first two rhyming words he found on the word list he was allowed to use.

Which test pilot broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 in 1947 despite breaking two ribs in a riding fall?

Chuck Yeager could not seal the hatch with his injury, so he secretly asked fellow pilot Jack Ridley for help. Ridley sawed the end off a broom handle for him to use as a lever.

Which star of Rear Window retired from acting at 26 to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco?

Grace Kelly made three Alfred Hitchcock thrillers in two years: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. The wedding took place in April 1956.

Which B-29 bomber, named by pilot Paul Tibbets after his mother, dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima?

Enola Gay Tibbets had herself been named for the heroine of a novel. Her son put the name on the aircraft on 5 August 1945, during preparations for the mission.

Which English medical student ran the first mile in under four minutes at Oxford's Iffley Road track in 1954?

Roger Bannister fitted his running around his studies at St Mary's Hospital in London, training at a nearby recreation ground. Chris Brasher was one of his two pacemakers on the day.

Which New York Yankees center fielder set baseball's longest hitting streak, 56 games, in the summer of 1941?

Joe DiMaggio, nicknamed the Yankee Clipper, spent his entire 13-year major league career with the one club. The streak ran from 15 May to 16 July.

Which Wisconsin senator shot to fame in 1950 by claiming to hold a list of Communists in the State Department?

Joseph McCarthy was censured by his fellow senators in 1954, the year of the highly publicised Army hearings. He died in office three years later.

Which big band leader vanished in December 1944 when his flight over the English Channel never reached France?

Glenn Miller was by then an officer in the US Army Air Forces, leading a service orchestra. He was travelling as a passenger in a small Norseman aircraft.

Which children's modelling compound was first made in Cincinnati in the 1930s as a wallpaper cleaner?

Play-Doh was devised to lift coal residue off wallpaper in coal-heated homes. It was reworked and marketed to Cincinnati schools in the mid-1950s.

Which American aid programme sent over $13 billion to rebuild the economies of Western Europe after World War II?

Marshall Plan aid was also offered to the Soviet Union, which refused it and blocked it for Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland. Its namesake won the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize.

Which territory was admitted as the 49th US state in January 1959, the first new state since 1912?

Alaska is larger than the next three largest states, Texas, California and Montana, combined. Its 1867 purchase from Russia for $7.2 million was nicknamed Seward's Folly, after the Secretary of State who negotiated it.

Which 64-minute animated feature of 1941 was made cheaply to recoup the losses of Pinocchio and Fantasia?

Dumbo was a deliberate pursuit of simplicity and economy, and it remains one of the studio's shortest animated features. World War II had cut off the European markets the earlier films needed.

Which toy, first distributed by Hasbro in 1952, was the first ever to be advertised on television?

Mr. Potato Head's campaign was also the first to be aimed directly at children rather than adults. Toymaker George Lerner had invented the toy in 1949.

Which Ford brand, launched in 1957 with a grille likened to a horse collar, ran up losses of over $250 million?

Edsel was named for Edsel Ford and arrived in a recession that hit sales of every medium-priced car. The brand was quietly discontinued in November 1959.

Which Paris couturier's first collection, shown in February 1947, was dubbed the New Look by Harper's Bazaar's editor?

Christian Dior had named the collection Corolla, picturing skirts that opened like flower petals. It re-established Paris as the centre of the fashion world after World War II.

Which balsa raft did Thor Heyerdahl sail for 101 days from Peru to the islands of Polynesia in 1947?

Kon-Tiki carried Heyerdahl and five companions about 6,900 km before it smashed into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus. The raft was built in an indigenous style from native materials.

Which Long Island community, built for returning veterans from 1947, is regarded as the first mass-produced suburb?

Levittown takes its name from its builder, Levitt & Sons, and became the archetype for postwar suburbs across the United States.

Which electronic computer, dubbed a Giant Brain by the press in 1946, was built to calculate Army artillery tables?

ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, and it cost $487,000. It was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania.

Which tennis player became the first Black winner of a Grand Slam event in 1956, then won Wimbledon the next year?

Althea Gibson won both Wimbledon and the US Nationals in 1957 and again in 1958. She later became the first Black player on the women's professional golf tour.

Which NBC quiz show's champion Charles Van Doren told Congress in 1959 that producers had given him the answers?

Twenty-One had been abruptly cancelled in October 1958, and the wider rigging scandal nearly finished off the quiz show genre. Van Doren first appeared on it in November 1956.

Which fastener did Swiss engineer George de Mestral conceive after burrs stuck to his dog on an Alpine hunting trip?

Velcro blends the French words velours, meaning velvet, and crochet, meaning hook. The idea dates from 1941, though the Swiss patent was only granted in 1955.

Which rebel leader fought a guerrilla war from the Sierra Maestra and took power in Cuba after Batista's fall in 1959?

Fidel Castro had first tried in 1953, with a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks. After the overthrow he took military and political power as Cuba's prime minister.