48 Fun Facts About 50s and 60s

Which Soviet satellite, launched in October 1957, started the Space Race?

Sputnik 1: the first US attempt to answer it, a Vanguard rocket in December 1957, rose only a few feet, fell back and exploded, and the press dubbed it Flopnik.

Which war lasted from June 1950 until an armistice in July 1953?

Korean War: armistice talks dragged on for two years, largely because many captured Chinese and North Korean soldiers refused to be sent home.

Whose nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 triggered an invasion by Britain, France and Israel?

Gamal Abdel Nasser: the invaders hoped to topple him, but pressure from the US and the Soviet Union forced them to withdraw, and he stayed in power.

Who overthrew Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1959?

Fidel Castro: Batista's government jailed him after a failed 1953 attack on an army barracks, then freed him in an amnesty two years later.

The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 was sparked by the arrest of which activist?

Rosa Parks: she was fired from her job as a department store seamstress after her arrest, and she received death threats.

Which disease saw a turning point in the 1950s with a successful vaccine?

Polio: soon after Jonas Salk's vaccine was licensed in 1955, faulty batches from Cutter Laboratories that still contained live virus caused thousands of infections.

Which pair announced the double-helix structure of DNA in the early 1950s?

Crick and Watson: they shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins, but Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images were key evidence, had died in 1958.

What was the first multipurpose charge card, launched in New York in 1950?

Diners Club: company lore says Frank McNamara came up with the idea after he forgot his wallet when the bill arrived at a New York restaurant.

Which company that had invented the transistor went on to create the MOSFET in 1959?

Bell Labs: the device seemed slow and met no pressing need of the telephone system, so Bell did not pursue it at first.

Which product did Dallas secretary Bette Nesmith Graham invent?

Liquid Paper: she began by painting over her typing errors with tempera paint, and she sold the company to Gillette for nearly $48 million.

What name was given to the first immortal human cell line, cultured in 1951?

HeLa: doctors took the cells from cancer patient Henrietta Lacks without her consent, and decades later her family sued companies that had profited from them.

Which singer died in the 1959 plane crash that became known as 'the Day the Music Died'?

Buddy Holly: tired of broken-down tour buses in freezing weather, he chartered the small plane to reach the tour's next concert in Minnesota.

Which comic strip, launched in 1950, did one cartoonist write and draw alone for nearly 50 years?

Peanuts: Schulz hated the title, which his syndicate imposed after another cartoonist objected to the strip's original name, Li'l Folks.

Which 1959 epic won a record 11 Academy Awards?

Ben-Hur: at about $15 million it was then the most expensive film ever made, a make-or-break gamble for MGM, and its success saved the studio.

Audrey Hepburn won her Best Actress Oscar for which 1953 film?

Roman Holiday: its story Oscar went to Ian McLellan Hunter, a front for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, who was only given the award after his death.

Which 1955 film opened with Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock', helping send the song to No. 1?

Blackboard Jungle: the US ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, had it pulled from competition in Venice, fearing it would harm America's image abroad.

Which company first sold frozen meals under the name TV Dinner in the 1950s?

Swanson: a former executive claimed the idea came from a huge surplus of unsold Thanksgiving turkeys, but members of the Swanson family disputed his story.

Which 1950s sitcom topped the US TV ratings in four of its six seasons?

I Love Lucy: to film the show instead of airing it live, Ball and Arnaz took a pay cut, and in return they won ownership of the episodes.

Which president inaugurated transcontinental US television service in 1951?

Harry S. Truman: his speech crossed the country on a new chain of microwave relay towers, most of which were later abandoned as fibre-optic lines replaced them.

Where were the 1956 Summer Olympics held?

Melbourne: Australia's strict animal health rules meant the Games' horse-riding events had to be held on the other side of the world, in Stockholm.

In September 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to do what?

Crash into the Moon: eight months earlier Luna 1 had been meant to do the same, but it missed by about 6,000 km and ended up orbiting the Sun.

Which synthetic fibre was introduced in 1959?

Spandex: DuPont set out to make a better fibre for women's girdles, which were then made of rubber.

Who became the first human in space on 12 April 1961?

Yuri Gagarin: rather than landing inside his capsule, he ejected about 7 km above the ground and came down separately by parachute.

Who became the first woman in space in June 1963?

Valentina Tereshkova: the women's cosmonaut group was later disbanded, and no other woman flew in space until Svetlana Savitskaya, 19 years later.

Who stayed in orbit as Command Module Pilot while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?

Michael Collins: each time Columbia passed behind the Moon, he was cut off from all radio contact with Earth.

Which 1962 book by Rachel Carson warned of the harm done by pesticides such as DDT?

Silent Spring: it stirred widespread public alarm over pesticides, and in 1972 the new Environmental Protection Agency ordered an end to most uses of DDT.

Which volunteer programme did President Kennedy establish in 1961?

Peace Corps: Kennedy first challenged students to serve abroad in a late-night campaign speech at the University of Michigan.

In October 1962, what word did President Kennedy use instead of 'blockade' for the US naval action around Cuba?

Quarantine: a blockade was legally treated as an act of war, and the softer word also helped win the backing of the Organization of American States.

Which Berlin landmark saw a US-Soviet tank standoff in 1961?

Checkpoint Charlie: the standoff began after East German police stopped a senior US diplomat driving to the theatre in East Berlin and demanded his papers.

Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech at which 1963 event?

March on Washington: the famous 'I have a dream' passage was not in King's prepared text; he left his script and drew on lines he had used in earlier speeches.

Which president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Lyndon B. Johnson: Kennedy had proposed the bill in 1963, and it became law only after Johnson took over and supporters broke a months-long Senate filibuster.

The June 1969 riots seen as the birth of the gay rights movement happened at which New York bar?

Stonewall Inn: the bar was owned by the Mafia, and a year after the riots the first pride parades were held to mark the anniversary.

Which campaigner championed the research that produced the birth control pill?

Margaret Sanger: she brought the biologist Gregory Pincus together with the heiress Katharine McCormick, whose donations then paid for his research.

Who performed the first human heart transplant in 1967?

The operation took place in South Africa.

ARPANET, the 1969 forerunner of the Internet, was funded by which part of the US government?

Department of Defense: the network's first message, sent from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute, was meant to be 'login', but the system crashed after two letters.

Which Ford car, unveiled at the 1964 New York World's Fair, sold about a million within two years?

Mustang: for all its American swagger, the very first one sold went to a buyer in Newfoundland, Canada, three days before the official launch.

The Beatles' US breakthrough exploded after their 1964 appearance on which TV programme?

The Ed Sullivan Show: its host grew keen to book the Beatles after seeing crowds of fans greet them at London's airport in late 1963.

Which record label, founded by Berry Gordy, turned the Supremes and the Jackson 5 into stars?

Motown: Berry Gordy started the business in 1959 with just $800 borrowed from his family.

At which 1965 event did Bob Dylan famously 'go electric'?

Newport Folk Festival: Pete Seeger later said he wished he had an axe to cut the cables, though he blamed the harsh sound rather than the electric guitar.

Which 1966 Beach Boys album heavily influenced the Beatles' 'Sergeant Pepper' album?

Pet Sounds: Brian Wilson traded songs about surfing and cars for orchestral pop, and in the US it charted lower than most of the band's earlier albums.

At which festival did Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire during his first major American show?

Monterey Pop Festival: Hendrix and the Who both refused to go on after each other, so a coin toss settled it, and the Who went first.

Which free concert, four months after Woodstock, marked a dark end to 1969?

Altamont: the Rolling Stones' show was moved to the speedway at the last minute, after a deal to hold it at another racetrack, Sears Point, collapsed.

What was the highest-grossing film of the 1960s?

The Sound of Music: for a time it overtook Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film ever made, even though many critics dismissed it as saccharine.

Which 1962 film launched the James Bond series with Sean Connery?

Dr. No: as a joke, the villain's lair displayed a copy of Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, which had been stolen from London's National Gallery the year before.

Which designer popularised the miniskirt in the 1960s?

Mary Quant: she named it after her favourite make of car, the Mini, yet she said it was really the girls on London's King's Road who invented the miniskirt.

Which comics publisher introduced Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Hulk in the 1960s?

Marvel: in 1971 it published a Spider-Man story about drug addiction without the Comics Code seal of approval, and the industry's code was soon revised.

Which team won the first Super Bowl?

Green Bay Packers: the game was far from a sellout, with about a third of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum's 94,000 seats left empty.

Where were the 1964 Summer Olympics held?

Tokyo: a satellite launched that August, Syncom 3, carried live television pictures of the Games across the Pacific to viewers in the United States.