The Mental Floss History Of The World Part 30

Historians still argue about how effective FDR's New Deal programs were. But it's undeniable that they cheered people up, enough that they reelected Roosevelt in 1936, and gave him unprecedented third and fourth terms in 1940 and 1944.While trying to right the economy, Roosevelt and Congress also strove during the 1930s to keep the United States out of the looming conflicts in Asia and Europe. By 1940, however, it had become apparent to FDR that American involvement was inevitable. Somewhat reluctantly, he prodded Congress into approving a peacetime draft, doubling the size of the navy, and okaying the sale of military hardware to countries whose interests seemed aligned with those of the United States.After Pearl Harbor, U.S. industry began to flex its muscle. In 1942, for example, Roosevelt called for the production of fifty thousand planes a year. By 1944, Americans were building ninety-six thousand annually. Wartime production, in turn, heated up the economy, providing jobs and boosting wages.The economic good times continued after the war. Buffered by the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the United States suffered the least of all the major combatants during the war. There were plenty of jobs for returning servicemen, and $13 billion worth of educational and investment capital available to them through the GI Bill. From 1946 to 1960, the gross national product jumped from $200 billion to $500 billion a year.The GNP wasn't the only thing jumping. The two s.e.xes, largely separated during the war, overcompensated somewhat after the war was over. The U.S. population grew from 150 million to 180 million during the 1950s, and the "Baby Boom" generation would have social and economic impacts on the country for the rest of the century (and beyond).All this prosperity was accompanied by an unhealthy dose of paranoia, brought on by both the hot war in Korea and the cold war in Europe. Anticommunist feelings flourished, fueled in large part by an alcoholic U.S. senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy. The demagogic senator wildly charged that Communists had infiltrated nearly every level of American life, from the government and military to cla.s.srooms and the entertainment industry.While McCarthy was eventually discredited and shunned, the anticommunist feelings lingered. They were heightened on October 16, 1962, when U.S. intelligence services reported to President Kennedy that Soviet missile-launching sites were under construction in Cuba, less than one hundred miles from the Florida coast.

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.-President John F. Kennedy, in a nationwide address on October 22, 1962

For the next eleven days, the world teetered as close as it had ever come to nuclear war between the two superpowers. On October 22, Kennedy publicly revealed the presence of the sites, ordered a U.S. naval blockade of Cuba, and stepped up intense one-to-one negotiations with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

FIRST AMONG FIRST LADIES.

Her mother thought she was ugly, her maiden name was the same as her married name, and she was six feet tall. It's a bit of an understatement to say that Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was in many ways an extraordinary woman.She was born in 1884 in New York, the niece of Theodore Roosevelt. Both of her parents died before she was ten-but not before her mother had time to ridicule her publicly for her plain appearance.In 1905, she married Franklin D. Roosevelt, a very distant cousin. The couple had six children. It was an often painful marriage for Eleanor. FDR had a long and not very well concealed affair with Eleanor's social secretary. In 1921, he was stricken with polio, and Eleanor became his legs, making political trips for him when he couldn't travel.When Franklin won the presidency in 1932, Eleanor threw herself into the role of First Lady with zeal heretofore unseen. She held regular press conferences, but for women correspondents only. News organizations that had never hired female reporters were thus pushed into doing so. She also wrote a syndicated newspaper column that recounted life in the White House, and doled out advice.Eleanor toured the country extensively, reporting directly to FDR about Depression-era conditions. And she was an outspoken champion of civil rights and women's issues. Although her activism earned her praise, it also made her the target of often vicious and personal criticism.After FDR's death, President Truman appointed her a delegate to the United Nations. At the UN, she served as chairman of the Commission on Human Rights. She was also active in national Democratic politics.Eleanor died at the age of seventy-eight from a rare form of tuberculosis. Four former, current, and future presidents attended her funeral, including Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson."She was," Truman said, "the First Lady of the world."

On October 28, Khrushchev blinked. The Soviet missiles would be removed and the sites dismantled. In return, the United States promised not to invade Cuba, and eventually removed American missiles from sites in Turkey.Coupled with Soviet advances in s.p.a.ce and military technology, however, the Cuban missile crisis fed into a new feeling among many Americans: Maybe those oceans weren't going be enough to protect the country in the next world war.WHO'S UP, WHO'S DOWN The Subcontinent: UP UP [image]

It took decades of sit-ins, boycotts, and turning the other cheek-along with more than a few violent confrontations-but the Indian subcontinent bore two new nations after World War II.India had been under the thrall of Great Britain since the eighteenth century, and not surprisingly, the natives weren't happy about it. In 1919, after a British ma.s.sacre of Indian demonstrators, the Indians took a different tack: civil disobedience, coupled with nonviolent resistance.Leading the effort was a British-educated lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi. When the British inst.i.tuted a new tax on salt in 1930, for example, Gandhi led thousands of Indians on a 250-mile march to the sea to gather salt for themselves. The Brits responded by jailing 60,000 Indians, including Gandhi.

Nonviolence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another. There is no G.o.d higher than truth.-Mohandas Gandhi, 1939

After a few years of on-again-off-again tactics like this, the British agreed in 1935 to allow Indian provinces to govern themselves on matters within the provinces, but the country itself remained under British control. It was a half-a-loaf approach that pleased almost no one. When World War II began, the Indian leaders refused to take part or encourage Indians to help, because they hadn't been consulted about the Allies' decision to declare war on the Axis powers.

THE GANDHI MAN CAN.

One of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's early report cards rated him "good at English, fair in arithmetic and weak in geography." He turned out to be pretty good at political science, too.Born in 1869 near Bombay, Gandhi studied law in England and became an attorney. In 1893, he signed a one-year contract to practice law in South Africa. The country's segregated policies helped transform him from a mild-mannered lawyer into a mild-mannered but determined civil rights leader. He became the guiding light of a two-decade-long, partially successful struggle to win legal and political rights for Indians and "people of color" in South Africa.Equipped with political tools such as civil disobedience and pa.s.sive resistance, Gandhi returned to India in 1914 to take up the fight for independence from the British Empire. He organized boycotts of British goods and businesses, and advocated avoidance of the empire's legal system. In 1930, he led a much-heralded 250-mile march to protest a tax on salt, which resulted in one of his several prison stretches.By 1931, Gandhi was Time Time magazine's "Man of the Year" and had earned the nickname Mahatma, or "Great Soul." In his personal life, Gandhi was a stirring example of humility. He was a strict vegetarian, wove his own clothes, and lived as simply as a national leader could. magazine's "Man of the Year" and had earned the nickname Mahatma, or "Great Soul." In his personal life, Gandhi was a stirring example of humility. He was a strict vegetarian, wove his own clothes, and lived as simply as a national leader could.By the time India finally won its independence in 1947, Gandhi's primary mission had s.h.i.+fted to trying to quell the b.l.o.o.d.y violence between Hindus and Muslims on the subcontinent.On January 30, 1948, while on his nightly stroll, Gandhi was shot and killed by a Hindu fanatic who was furious at the Mahatma's efforts to reach an accord with Muslims. His October 2 birthday has become a national holiday in India.

In 1946, a rebellion in the Royal Indian Navy set off widespread violence, and the British government, weary after years of war, decided that enough was enough. Prime Minister Clement Atlee announced in March that the empire would agree to full Indian independence.Gandhi and nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru (who would become India's first prime minister) wanted to preserve the subcontinent as a unified nation, with equal rights for the country's Hindu and Muslim populations. But Indian Muslims, led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, wanted their own piece of real estate. The result was a series of violent clashes between the two religious groups.On August 15, 1947, Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan became separate nations. The fighting, however, intensified as members of the two religions moved to and from the two states. More than five hundred thousand people died as Muslims fled west and Hindus moved east. A full-fledged, albeit brief, war broke out between the two fledgling states over who would have authority over the region of Kashmir. It was settled, at least temporarily, by a United Nations mandate. But the fight would prove to be only the first of several wars between the two nations separated at birth.Jews: DOWN, BUT NEVER OUT DOWN, BUT NEVER OUT Anxious to keep Russia fighting during World War I, British officials came up with a strategy to encourage Russia's Jews to support the Allied effort: promise them a Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war. After the war, the League of Nations picked up the idea, proclaiming that Jews had a right to immigrate to the Middle Eastern region then controlled by Great Britain.But nothing much came of it. And through the 1920s and 1930s, Europe's Jews became the primary target of Adolf Hitler's n.a.z.ism as. .h.i.tler gradually gained power in Germany. The Jews, he charged, were conspiring with the Communists to stamp out Hitler's mythical Aryan race."There is no such thing as coming to an understanding with the Jews," he wrote in his book Mein Kampf Mein Kampf. "It must be the hard-and-fast 'either-or.'"Formal persecution of Jews in Germany began almost as soon as. .h.i.tler a.s.sumed control. In April 1933, Jews were banned from all civil service and teaching positions. By the end of 1935, they had lost their German citizens.h.i.+p and virtually all other rights. Hitler initially wanted to expel Jews from the Continent, but the outbreak of the war thwarted his plan. Then he attempted to isolate them in ghettoes, where they could be used as a source of labor. But by late 1941, a "Final Solution" had been formed. Eight major extermination camps were set up. An estimated 6.0 million Jews were systematically murdered, 1.5 million of them children.The end of the war and the Holocaust did not end persecution of Jews in Europe; more than a thousand were murdered in 1946 in Poland alone. So it wasn't surprising that many European Jews wanted to go elsewhere. Many of them did-to the Palestinian "homeland" the British had dangled before them in 1917.But Great Britain, facing economic troubles at home, wanted nothing to do with sorting out differences between Jews and Muslim Arabs in Palestine. More than fifty thousand European Jews were intercepted by the Brits and placed in camps on the island of Cyprus. Finally, Britain lobbed the issue to the fledgling United Nations. On November 29, 1947, the UN narrowly voted to part.i.tion Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

A FACE IN THE CROWD.

Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank was born in Frankfurt in 1929. Her father, Otto, had been a decorated German officer in World War I. But he was also a Jew.Fearful of what the n.a.z.i ascension to power portended for Jews, Frank moved the family to Amsterdam when Anne was four. An energetic girl who yearned to be a published writer, Anne had what seemed like a bright future. In May 1940, however, Germany invaded the Netherlands.In the summer of 1942, the Franks went into hiding, in rooms at the back of Otto Frank's office building. Friends supplied the family with food and other necessities. In an autograph book she had been given for her birthday, Anne began keeping a diary. Her entries varied from schoolgirl observations to abstract thoughts about G.o.d and somber reflections on her family's plight."In spite of everything," she wrote in one entry, "I still believe that people are really good at heart."In August 1944, German security police raided the Franks' hiding place, apparently having been tipped off by an informant. The family was sent first to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then to Bergen-Belsen. There Anne died, apparently of typhus, a few weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops.After the war, Anne's father, the only family member to survive, recovered her diary from friends who had found it in the hiding place. He had it published, first in Dutch in 1947, then in English in 1952.Since then, the diary has been published in more than fifty languages, become the subject of plays and movies, and been widely praised for bringing to life the individual horrors of the Holocaust in a way that mind-numbing statistics might not.

On May 14, 1948, the last British troops pulled out of the region. About ten minutes after the withdrawal-literally-the United States formally recognized the new nation of Israel. The Soviet Union quickly followed suit. And the new nation's Arab neighbors promptly attacked. A year-long war ensued before the Arab nations grudgingly-and only temporarily-gave up the fight. More than six hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs fled Israeli territory to refugee camps in Jordan, Egypt-controlled Gaza, and Syria.The Jews had a homeland-and a whole new set of problems in the decades to come.Communists: UP AND ALL OVER UP AND ALL OVER On March 5, 1946, British leader Winston Churchill gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," he said, "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." Churchill's reference to the postwar spread of communism marked what many historians cite as the formal beginning of the cold war.Prior to World War II, the apostles of the Communist political philosophy had either been stymied by nationalist and/or fascist governments, or had confined themselves to consolidating power within the Soviet Union. But even before the war ended, Soviet troops were already positioning Communists into power in Poland and Romania. After the war, the Soviets, and eventually China's Communist government, began to seek to expand their influence even farther into countries that had been freed of j.a.panese and German authority.Some of the expansion was internal. In China, for instance, the Communist Party's members.h.i.+p grew from 4.5 million in 1949 to 17.5 million in 1961. But most of the expansion was directed outward. By 1961, Communist governments controlled not only the Soviet Union and China, but also most of Eastern Europe and much of Southeast Asia.Naturally, the capitalist West, led by the United States, took umbrage. The threat of the use of nuclear weapons by one side or the other-or both-made the cold war potentially the most deadly and horrific of all of mankind's conflicts. But the very threat of a nuclear "hot" war reined in both Communist and capitalist interests from pus.h.i.+ng the other side too far or too hard.Instead of face-to-face confrontations, the two sides more often used proxies, backing factions in various third world countries, particularly in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Both sides plied the nonaligned nations with economic, military, and technological aid. Somehow, the third world countries rarely seemed to profit from all this attention.Soviets: WAAAY UP WAAAY UP One of the hottest fronts in the cold war was the compet.i.tion between the USSR and the United States to conquer s.p.a.ce. In 1957, the Soviets had jumped in the lead by successfully launching Sputnik, an unmanned orbital satellite. And on April 12, 1961, they decisively won the first-man-in-s.p.a.ce leg of the race.At 9:07 a.m., Moscow time, a 4.75-ton s.p.a.cecraft called Voltok 1 was launched from a field in Kazakhstan. In it was a twenty-seven-year-old Russian Air Force second lieutenant named Yuri A. Gagarin.Born on a collective farm, this son of a carpenter was selected for the flight in part because at five feet, two inches tall, he was a good fit for the tiny capsule. Another reason was his outgoing personality. During the flight, he whistled a Russian tune called "The Motherland Knows," the lyrics of which include "the Motherland knows where her son flies in the sky."By the time the capsule landed 108 minutes later, Gagarin had been promoted to major, a rank Soviet leaders thought more befitting the first human to fly into s.p.a.ce and come back alive.Gagarin's feat not only sped up the s.p.a.ce race, but also made him a Soviet hero and a worldwide celebrity. Monuments were raised in his honor, and streets-and eventually his hometown-were renamed after him.The Soviet success, while an inspiration to much of mankind, was unquestionably a black eye to the United States in its quest to win the hearts and minds of third world nations. "America must wake up completely to the challenge," declared U.S. senator Hubert Humphrey on the day of Gagarin's flight.

ANOTHER RACE TO THE TOP.

When the Tibetan government granted access to the tallest Himalayan peaks to the outside world in 1921, the climbers came calling. By 1953, seven expeditions had tried and failed to reach the tip of Mount Everest.In 1951, a British reconnaissance team found what looked like a promising route to the top, up the south face of the summit. Two years later, under the leaders.h.i.+p of a masterful organizer named Colonel John Hunt, a team of British climbers and Sherpa guides prepared to try the route.After establis.h.i.+ng nine camps along the way, the first two-man a.s.sault team gave it a try, using a closed-circuit breathing system that circulated pure oxygen. But the system apparently leaked, and they came up short.Two days later, on May 28, 1953, a team consisting of Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide, began a final push from a camp at 27,900 feet. Unlike the previous team, they used an open-circuit breathing system, which was much lighter.At 11:30 a.m., on May 29, Hillary and Norgay reached the summit. They shook hands, embraced, ate some sweets, left a food offering for the G.o.ds, and started down again after fifteen minutes.When they reached the base camp, according to expedition member George Lowe, the first thing Hillary said was "Well, George, we've finally knocked the b.a.s.t.a.r.d off!"As of mid-2007, more than two thousand people from around the world had followed in their footsteps up Mount Everest.

On May 5, the United States sent navy commander Alan Shepard into s.p.a.ce, albeit for only 15 minutes and 115 miles. And on May 25, President John F. Kennedy announced that America would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.The Soviets followed their satellite and s.p.a.ceman successes on March 17, 1965, with the first s.p.a.cewalk, when cosmonaut Alexei Leonov spent ten minutes outside his s.p.a.cecraft.In 1968, Gagarin was killed when his plane crashed during a routine training flight while he was re-qualifying as a fighter pilot. The following year, his outer s.p.a.ce accomplishment was eclipsed somewhat when the United States successfully landed men on the moon.Still, first is first, and Gagarin was first. Plus he was well named for his feat: Gagarin Gagarin is derived from the Russian word for "wild duck." is derived from the Russian word for "wild duck."International Teamwork: UP(ISH) UP(ISH) While the League of Nations had been largely a failure (mostly because it lacked any way to enforce sanctions or crack down on rogue countries), the anti-Axis states decided to give a nation co-op another try.As the war wound down, representatives from fifty nations met in San Francisco in April 1945. The conference hammered out a charter for a multinational group and called it the United Nations Organization (UNO). Apparently that acronym didn't work for the member nations, and it became known simply as the UN.The organization's formal birthday was October 24, 1945, after its charter was ratified by the Security Council, which was composed of the five big winners of the war: the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and the United States.

THE LAST WORD.

The United Nations has been the scene of some pretty memorable rhetoric over the years, but few have had as much wit and drama as this October 25, 1962, exchange between U.S. amba.s.sador Adlai Stevenson and Soviet amba.s.sador Valerian Zorin:"Do you, Amba.s.sador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed and is placing medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no-don't wait for the translation-yes or no?""I am not in an American courtroom, and therefore I do not wish to answer. In due course, sir, you will have your reply.""You are in the courtroom of world opinion right now, and you can answer yes or no.""You will have your answer in due course.""I am prepared to wait for my answer until h.e.l.l freezes over."

"The charter of the United Nations which you have just signed," U.S. president Harry Truman told the a.s.sembled delegates, "is a solid structure upon which we can build a better world."How accurate Truman was is of course in the eye of the beholder. There's no question the UN has been far more effective than the League of Nations. For one thing there hasn't been a major worldwide conflict since World War II. On the other hand, the UN has failed to stop several genocides and more than a few regionalized wars.The number of UN Member States has grown from 51 to 192, but not without controversy. In 1971, for example, the United States finally gave in to pressure and agreed to admit the People's Republic of China and throw out Nationalist China (Taiwan), which had been an original member of the Security Council.Polio: DOWN DOWN Give a University of Pittsburgh doctor some monkey kidneys, and you just might start stamping out a nasty contagious disease that particularly stalks children.Of course there are a few steps in between. The disease in question is polio, a viral illness that in about 98 percent of cases produces either no or only mild symptoms. In the other 2 percent, however, the disease can permanently cripple and kill.Although the disease dates back at least to ancient Egypt, its most extensive outbreaks occurred-unexpectedly enough-in industrialized countries during the twentieth century. The theory is that since it is most readily spread through contact with fecal matter, generations of hand-was.h.i.+ng kids didn't get exposed to it at an early age, when symptoms were likely to be less severe.The result was that by the early 1950s, there was a very big population susceptible to polio. In 1952, there were sixty thousand cases in the United States alone, with three thousand deaths. Millions of dollars in research funds were invested, and by 1955, an injectable vaccine developed by University of Pittsburgh scientist Jonas Salk was licensed for use.Salk's vaccine, grown in kidney tissue from rhesus monkeys, was used in ma.s.s immunization campaigns. By 1957, the annual number of polio cases in the United States had dropped to 5,600.In 1961, an oral vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin was introduced. Worldwide vaccination campaigns through the World Health Organization have almost eradicated polio around the globe. In 1988, 355,000 cases in 125 countries were reported. By 2006, the total had dropped to fewer than 2,000, and was endemic in only 6 countries.SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE...

The Mighty Pen [image]

For dozens of years, mankind had searched for a reliable writing tool that used a quick-drying ink, didn't have to be refilled all the time, and wasn't too messy.Enter Lazlo Biro. In 1938, Biro was a thirty-nine-year-old Hungarian newspaper editor who had observed that newspaper ink dried fast but wouldn't work well in a fountain pen. Working with his chemist brother Georg, Biro came up with a pen featuring a tip with a freely revolving ball, and ink in a cartridge. They patented the idea in Paris in 1938.In 1940, the brothers, who were Jewish, fled Europe to Argentina, where they opened a ballpoint pen factory. A few years later, a vacationing American named Milton Reynolds saw the Biro brothers' pen and decided to bring it back to the United States-albeit without their permission. On October 29, 1949, the Reynolds pen went on sale at Gimbels department store in New York. It was a smash hit, with 10,000 pens sold in a single day-at $12.50 each.But the unreliability and expense of the pens cried out for further innovation. In 1949, two guys named Patrick Frawley, Jr., and Fran Seech came up with a pen that used no-smear ink and had a retractable tip. They called it the Papermate. In 1952, a French guy named Marcel b.i.+.c.h came up with a smooth-writing pen in a clear plastic barrel, dropped the last letter of his last name, and gave birth to the Bic.But the Biro brothers were not forgotten. In many countries, ball-point pens are still called biros, and September 29-Lazlo's birthday-is celebrated in Argentina as Inventors' Day.A Famous Formula He had the most ill.u.s.trious brain of the twentieth century-so maybe it was fitting that when he died, they took it out of his head to study it. In fact, it's just what Albert Einstein wanted.Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany. As a boy, he later recalled, his future course in science was set by two events. One was being mystified at the age of five by a compa.s.s. The other was an encounter-and subsequent fascination-with a geometry book at the age of twelve.After a circuitous education that saw him fail to finish high school but eventually allowed him to graduate from a Swiss university, Einstein tried and failed to get a job as a teacher or a.s.sistant to a scientist. He finally took a job as a clerk in a Swiss patent office.In 1905, while still working for the patent office, Einstein earned a doctorate from the University of Zurich. He also published four astonis.h.i.+ng papers on physics that year. Among other things, he posited that time slows down for an object at high speeds relative to a fixed point on earth, and that ma.s.s is just energy in another form, and energy is equal to ma.s.s times the speed of light squared...or E = mc2. (Remember what that stands for, and you'll be a hit at c.o.c.ktail parties.)Einstein eventually returned to his native Germany. In 1921, winning the n.o.bel Prize in Physics enhanced his worldwide fame. But Einstein was Jewish, and after Hitler came to power, the physicist and mathematician was certainly smart enough to know that his days in Germany were numbered. He accepted a job at Princeton University in New Jersey in 1933, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen.Although Einstein urged President Roosevelt as early as 1939 to develop a nuclear weapon-as a defense against the possibility Germany would develop a similar weapon-he was an ardent opponent of war. "I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," he once said, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth-rocks."

ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON.

In 1953, British physicist Francis Crick and U.S. biochemist James Watson used beads, wire, and cardboard to build their famous three-dimensional model of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

At the time of his death from a heart attack in 1955, Einstein was one of the most famous men in the world. His casual attire, wild hair, and eccentric persona made him, in the words of one biographer, "a cartoonist's dream," and his very surname became a synonym for intelligence.By his own request, Einstein's body was cremated and his brain donated to scientific study. Like everything else, he wanted to find out what made himself tick.Good Things in Small Packages Next time an annoying telephone commercial has you on the brink of madness, you might take comfort in the fact that compet.i.tion between phone companies just might have given us the most important invention of the twentieth century.In 1906, as Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patents were expiring, different phone companies were looking for an edge. At America Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), they decided to focus on development of a vacuum tube that would amplify phone signals and allow them to be transmitted long distances. The tubes worked, but they were expensive, short-lived, got hot, and needed vast amounts of electricity.Although some German scientists made strides in developing a viable subst.i.tute to the tubes, the real breakthrough came after World War II, at AT&T's Bell Laboratories. On December 23, 1947, three physicists-William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain-demonstrated a new device, called a transistor, that let weak electronic signals control much stronger signals, sort of like a faucet on a water line, without needing a vacuum tube.The invention wasn't made public until June 25, 1948, and didn't make much of an impression. Shockley, who later shared a 1956 n.o.bel Prize with Bardeen and Brattain, eventually developed an even better transistor. But while they were a vast improvement on tubes, individual transistors still had to be connected to other components such as resistors and capacitors, and there were still limits to circuit construction.In 1959, however, U.S. scientists came up with an "integrated" circuit, which put multiple transistors and other components on a single chip of silicon (which, as a semi-conductor, both allows the flow of electrons and acts as insulation).Since the early 1960s, the number of circuits that can be placed on a single chip has doubled every eighteen months, leading to the development of microprocessors-so you can just blame your Internet addiction on phone companies trying to get an edge.

SOME OTHER ADDICTIVE INVENTIONS.

While in New York to attend a toy fair, in 1957, Southern California toy makers Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Merlin heard about a kids' craze in Australia that involved rotating a wooden hoop around the hips.In 1958, they began producing a three-foot-in-diameter plastic hoop. They couldn't patent the device, since kids had been playing with hoops since at least the days of ancient Egypt. But they did trademark the name: Hula Hoop.By the end of 1959, the Wham-O Company had sold more than 100 million of the $1.98 hoops around the world.And even when the craze ended, Knerr and Merlin doubtless found consolation in another plastic toy they had actually come up with the year before the Hula Hoop: a plastic disc called the Frisbee.

Cars for the "Volks"

It was commissioned by a monster, designed for the common man, and became the single most popular car model in the history of automobiles.The lowly Volkswagen Beetle came about when in 1933 German dictator Adolf Hitler told auto designer Ferdinand Porsche that he wanted an affordable car for the average German, one that would seat five, get good gas mileage, and be capable of going sixty miles per hour on the system of freeways he was building, called the Autobahn.Porsche came up with a round-topped two-door auto with a four-cylinder, air-cooled, rear-mounted engine and a four-speed manual transmission. Hitler wanted to call the vehicle the Kraft durch Freude Wagen Kraft durch Freude Wagen, meaning "Strength-through-Joy car," or KdFwagen KdFwagen. But the name didn't catch on, and the vehicle eventually became known as "the People's Car," or "Volkswagen."The Volkswagen factory opened in 1938 and Germans were encouraged to make weekly deposits into a savings plan that would eventually be enough to buy a car. But the war kept car production to a minimum, and Allied bombing destroyed two thirds of the factory.After the war, British and U.S. automakers turned down the chance to take over the plant, and most of the few Beetles that were made went to the British Army and the German Post Office.By 1948, however, a British major named Ivan Hirst and a German engineer named Heinrich Nordhoff had rallied the factory into accelerating production. More than 500,000 had been built by 1953, and 5 million by 1961. In 1972, the Beetle pa.s.sed the Ford Model T as the most-built model, and by the time the last one rolled off a Mexican production line in 2003, more than 22 million had been sold in more than 140 countries.By the way, Hitler, who did not drive, most often rode around in a Mercedes-Benz.The Devil's Music It was a uniquely American sound, an amalgam of blues, folk, gospel, and country music, with roots that were decidedly African American. Its name came from an African American slang term for s.e.x. It was hated by adults and adored by teenagers, and by the end of the twentieth century, it could be reasonably argued that it was the most dominant form of popular music in the world.While rock 'n' roll's roots were many and varied, its rise after World War II had as much to do with postwar American affluence as with the music itself. White teenagers had an average of ten dollars a week to spend, and they increasingly spent it on what had been referred to first as "race music" and then "rhythm and blues."In 1952, however, a savvy Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed began calling it "rock 'n' roll," a term that allowed whites to more comfortably embrace-and co-opt-the sound. By 1955, rock 'n' roll was beginning to have a major influence on popular culture, from dress and hairstyles to movies.It also inexorably, if inadvertently, blurred U.S. racial divisions. In fact, it's been argued that rock 'n' roll's ascension in the 1950s was a key ingredient in making integration efforts more acceptable to younger Americans.Ministers, educators, and parents decried it as immoral, disrespectful, and potentially anarchistic. Music critics sneered it as ephemeral: "It has a clanking, socked-out beat, a braying, honking saxophone, a belted vocal, and, too often, suggestive lyrics," a Time Time magazine critic sniffed in 1955. magazine critic sniffed in 1955.No matter. Led by a former truck driver from Memphis whose real name was Elvis Presley, rock 'n' roll musicians became demiG.o.ds to millions of teens. Presley alone had six major hits in 1956, and at one point was selling a staggering seventy-five thousand records a day.In 1957, rockers Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis toured Australia, and Bill Haley and the Comets toured Europe. Rock 'n' roll was here-and there-to stay.Dirty Books When Alfred Kinsey graduated from high school in New Jersey in 1910, they put a line from Hamlet Hamlet under his yearbook photo: "Man delights not me; no, nor woman." under his yearbook photo: "Man delights not me; no, nor woman."Boy, were they wrong.True, Kinsey initially went on to become a zoologist who specialized in the characteristics of gall wasps, not people. But in 1938, goaded by his students at the University of Indiana, Kinsey began a ten-year study of human s.e.xual behavior.In 1948, he published an 804-page work called s.e.xual Behavior in the Human Male s.e.xual Behavior in the Human Male. Based on 12,124 case histories, Kinsey's report stunned Americans with its findings: 85 percent of American males had s.e.x before marriage; 70 percent had visited a prost.i.tute; 33 percent had had a h.o.m.os.e.xual experience.Almost as stunning as Kinsey's conclusions were the book's sales. Despite its leaden, scholarly format, in just a few months it sold 250,000 copies-at $6.50 apiece. In 1953, Kinsey released a similar report on female s.e.xuality (50 percent of U.S. females had s.e.x before marriage; 26 percent fooled around after marriage), and that one sold even better.Kinsey's methodology was criticized for relying on samples that while large, were not randomly selected enough to ensure they were reflective of the entire population.The most virulent criticism, however, was on moral grounds. The Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune, for example, labeled it "a real menace to society" on the grounds it would lower moral standards. Others condemned it for dehumanizing human s.e.xuality by reducing it to a mere physical function.But history has since credited Kinsey with greatly contributing to an understanding of human s.e.xuality by dragging the subject from behind closed doors."If I had any ulterior motive in making this study," said Kinsey, who died in 1956 at the age of sixty-two, "it was the hope that it would make people more tolerant."

ITSY-BITSY.

Although tiny two-piece swimming attire had been around since the ancient Egyptians, the modern version can be traced to French designers Jacques Heim and Louis Reard. On July 5, 1946, they unveiled their creation at a Paris fas.h.i.+on show. The suit, known as a bikini, was named after a South Pacific atoll where the United States had conducted atomic weapons tests.

AND THANKS, BUT NO THANKS, FOR...

The 411 on Hitler's Naughty Bits [image]

Adolf Hitler was a s.e.xually repressed incestuous gay or bis.e.xual sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t with an Oedipus complex and only one t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e and probably had syphilis. At least that's the amalgamated opinion about the German dictator propagated by amateur and professional head shrinkers. How much, if any, of this is true is unknown, but it hasn't stopped a vast herd of people from trying to find a s.e.xual explanation for Hitler's monstrous behavior.For example, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, speculated in 1943 that Hitler had "possibly even a h.o.m.os.e.xual streak in him." The report also stated Der Fuehrer liked to have women urinate on him.The famed psychoa.n.a.lyst Carl Jung speculated that Hitler had "characteristics of a man...with female instincts." The famed n.a.z.i hunter Simon Wiesenthal theorized that Hitler's hatred of Jews stemmed from his contracting syphilis from a Jewish prost.i.tute in Vienna before World War I.Other observers noted that most of the women Hitler hung out with looked at least a little like his mom. A 2001 book by German historian Lothar Machtan concluded that Hitler was gay. And a widely reported story is that Soviet medical examiners conducted an autopsy of Hitler's body after the war and found that he had only one t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e.While this is t.i.tillating historical fodder, there isn't a lot of evidence to support it. Hitler's contemporaries recalled more than anything that he was a loner, with no real interest in people as a species or individually. He is believed to have had an affair with a niece named Geli Raubal, who subsequently committed suicide. In 1935, his longtime mistress and very short-time wife, Eva Braun, wrote "he needs me only for certain purposes," but she didn't elaborate. (She did say that Hitler liked Valkyrie-proportioned women.)That Hitler had some kind of testicular abnormality, however, was probably true. Of course most any Allied soldier from World War II could have attested to the Fuehrer's lack of b.a.l.l.s.Backstabbing In-Laws Nothing like a brother-in-law to steer you wrong. At least that was U.S. Army sergeant David Greengla.s.s's story. A machinist at the top-secret Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, Greengla.s.s was busted in 1950 for pa.s.sing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.Greengla.s.s promptly ratted on his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, and her husband, Julius. The couple were arrested and charged with espionage. At their trial, Greengla.s.s testified that Julius had recruited him to steal secrets in 1944. He later also testified against his sister.Greengla.s.s got fifteen years in prison, and was released in 1960. The Rosenbergs, however, got the electric chair. Their execution at New York's Sing Sing prison, on June 19, 1953, made them the only American civilians to be executed for espionage during the cold war."I consider your crime worse than murder," Judge Irving Kaufman said in handing down the sentence. The judge blamed the Rosenbergs for encouraging Communist aggression in Korea. "By your betrayal," he charged, "you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country."During the two years between their sentencing and their execution, supporters of the couple hollered long and loud that (1) the Rosenbergs had been railroaded because of the near-hysterical anticommunist fervor in the country at the time; (2) even if they were guilty, the stuff they pa.s.sed on wasn't worth much; and (3) their sentence was way too severe. But those arguments were lost in the uproar of anticommunist hysteria, which was fueled by the demagogic rants of Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy.Subsequent events-including the posthumously published memoirs of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1990 and security doc.u.ments decla.s.sified in 1995-seemed to indicate pretty conclusively that Julius was certainly guilty of helping to operate a Soviet spy ring. But it's also likely that Ethel, while cognizant of her husband's activities, did very little actual espionage. In 1996, in fact, Greengla.s.s admitted in a book that he had lied about his sister's involvement to protect his own wife and children.And with the aid of historical hindsight, the sentence of the Rosenbergs today seems like, well, overkill.BY THE NUMBERS [image]

3.

number of American soldiers in the famous photo depicting the raising of the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi during the battle for the island of Iwo Jima who were later killed in the battle

6.

number of soldiers in the photo

8.

weight, in tons, of UNIVAC, or the Universal Automatic Computer (the first electronic digital computer designed for commercial use)

18.

cost, in cents, of a gallon of gasoline in the United States in 1933

30.

age of American singer and bandleader Bill Haley when "Rock Around the Clock" became the first truly international rock 'n' roll hit song in 1955

33.

number of whooping cranes left in the world in 1959 ~260.

number of whooping cranes estimated in the world in 2007

43.