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• Harry Truman becomes the first president to address the nation on TV from the White House.
In his speech, Truman called on Americans to conserve food to help hard-pressed Europeans, still recovering from the devastation caused by the war and threatened with a massive winter famine. He asked the agricultural industry and distillers to reduce grain use. He asked Americans to forgo eating meat on Tuesdays and eggs and poultry on Thursdays and to consume one fewer slice of bread every day, as the Marshall Plan spurred Western Europe’s -
• Transistor is invented, spurring growth in computers and electronics
But the limits of these tubes were soon reached. As the electric circuits became more complicated, one needed more and more triodes. Engineers packed several triodes into one vacuum tube (that is why the tube has so many legs) to make the tube circuits more efficient. -
President Eisenhower and Congress add the words “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Pledge of Allegiance was first written in 1892 for a magazine contest, and it read: "I Pledge Allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." The Pledge became part of the US Flag Code in 1942, and in 1954 President Eisenhower and Congress added the phrase "under God” into the Pledge -
• Polio vaccine announced to the world by Dr. Jonas Salk and Dr. Thomas Francis.
With these words on April 12, 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., director of the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, announced to the world that the Salk polio vaccine was up to 90% effective in preventing paralytic polio. Dr. Francis made the announcement to a crowd of scientists and reporters at the University of Michigan's Rackham Auditorium, concluding his two-year national field trials of the poliomyelitis vaccine developed by his form -
• The first nuclear power plant in the U.S. goes online at Shippingport, Pa.
the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime.we started to bulid it on Labor Day, September 9, 1954. President Eisenhower remotely initiated the first scoop of dirt at the ceremony -
NASA is established
its even weightier successors. In the midst of the Cold War, a country that aspired to global preeminence could not let that challenge pass. Although the United States already had its own satellite plans in place as part of the International Geophysical Year, the Russian events spurred the Space Age, and in particular gave urgency to the founding of an American national space agency.
