THE FIFTIES
A Chronology of Events
Editor: Piero Scaruffi
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1950:
- War in Korea: United Nations troops push back Chinese troops.
- the first Formula One championship
- The population of the world reaches 2.5 billion
- There are 51 million telephones in the world
1951:
- First color TV transmissions
1952:
- First sex change operation (George Jorgenson)
- Peak of the polio outbreak in the world (500,000 cases worldwide)
1953:
- Riots in East Berlin suppressed by Soviet troops
- Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double helix of the DNA
- Korea is permanently partitioned across the DMV. 37,000 American soldiers are killed, one million south Koreans are killed.
- Discovery of REM sleep
1954:
- Krushev head of the Soviet Union, de-stalinization, distension, pacific coexistence
- The USA threatens to use nuclear weapons to stop Soviet aggression in Europe
- First transistor radio
- France leaves Vietnam
1955:
- Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin invent the vaccine against polio
- Birth of Artificial Intelligence
- Disneyland opens in Los Angeles
- The Soviet Union withdraws from Austria, which becomes a neutral country
1956:
- South Vietnam refuses the referendum on unification with North Vietnam and the Vietminh starts a guerrilla war
- Hungarian revolution against communism (Nagy) is squashed by Soviet troops
- Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby invent the microchip
- The U.S. explodes the first hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll
- Telephone line between Europe and the United states laid at the bottom of the Atlantic
- Oral contraceptive (the "pill") is introduced
- Fidel Castro and Che Guevara land in Cuba to fight the US-sponsored dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista
1957:
- Little Rock, Arkansas is the site of a racial confrontation
- Britain becomes a nuclear power
- France becomes a nuclear power
- The Soviet Union launches the Sputnik, the first artificial satellite
1958:
- European democracies (Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France) found the CEE, which will become the European Union
- Texas Instruments builds the first integrated circuit
- Arthus Melin and Richard Knerr invent the frisbee
1959:
- Mary Leaker finds a 1.8 million years old human skeleton in Tanzania
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