FIAT produces the “600” and motorises Italy

After years of research, mathematicians at the Rand Corporation have published the paper “A Million Random Digits.”

At an international mathematics conference in Tokyo, the young Yutaka Taniyama suggests a curious relationship between modular forms and elliptic equations

S. Skewes shows that the frequency with which prime numbers become sparse, as found by Gauss, was underestimated for sufficiently large digits; the first such digit must be less than 10^10^1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000; if a person played chess with all the particles in the universe, where one move is equivalent to swapping places between two particles, then the number of possible games would be something like Skewes’s number.

The military overthrows the government of Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina.

The NATO alphabet is coined: Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whiskey Xray Yankee Zulu approved by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the FAA, and the International Telecommunication Union; sometimes different spellings are found: Alpha Juliett Juliette Oskar Viktor

Indonesia. The general election, with an exceptional turnout of 92% of eligible voters, leads to a stalemate: each of the four main parties wins between 15% and 22% of the vote. Sukarno ends the stalemate. In 1963, the dictatorship becomes official.

North American wins contract to build X-15 aircraft

Cold War. The United States believed it was catching up with the Soviet Union in terms of nuclear weapons. It amassed 2,280 thermonuclear weapons, twenty times the Soviets’. But this information would only become evident with the Corona spy satellite program from 1960 onwards. Until then, the Americans did not realize that the USSR was still recovering from the devastation of World War II. Meanwhile, the US, with bases in Greenland, Alaska, Japan, Korea, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Germany, and Italy, and a 20-to-1 advantage, could strike whenever and wherever it wanted. As late as 1964, the American advantage remained 6-to-1.

Operation Alert 1955. A Soviet nuclear attack on American cities is simulated, with bombs ranging from 20,000 to 5,000,000 tons. Sirens sound, 15,000 public employees are evacuated from Washington, D.C. alone, the president and his staff are taken to a secret location for three days, and people across the United States take shelter when possible or lock themselves in their homes, protecting themselves as best they can. New York City’s streets are half-empty for ten minutes. Ground zero, for some reason, is Brooklyn. An estimated 8.2 million Americans would have died. More than half would have been in New York City. The operation is declared a success, but Eisenhower is stunned by the absurdity of this war. The US Army continues to request soldiers to defend Western Europe, but with half the country in total collapse, how can they send or keep soldiers in Europe?

China. Mao refuses to join the Warsaw Pact, as Moscow had requested.

Cuba. Fidel Castro is released from prison by Batista. Two years earlier, there had been an attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attempt had failed, and among those arrested were Fidel Castro and his men. Fidel’s mother rushed to Santiago to contact Galician Archbishop Enrique Pérez Serantes, begging him to pressure her son’s life. Before the court, Fidel delivered an hours-long speech, which Zanatta described as “the harangue of a fiery Jesuit.” Fidel was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but on May 15, 1955, he was released under an amnesty mandated by Batista.

The Warsaw Pact is born

Hungary: Reformer Nagy ousted from leadership

Wernher Von Braun, the new director of the American Institute for Space Exploration in Huntsville, Alabama, calls on Oberth, his former mentor when they were in Germany, to work on a project called “The Development of Space Technologies in the Next Ten Years.”

A few weeks after US President Eisenhower’s statements on the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons, China extended an olive branch: “The Chinese people do not want a war against the United States.” The following week, China ceased its eight-month-long bombing campaign in the Taiwan Strait.

In one of his last acts before his death, Albert Einstein wrote a short but intense preface to the book “Earth’s Shifting Crust: a Key to some Basic Problems of Earth Science” by Charles Hapgood, in which he harshly criticized the theory of continental drift.

A group of scientists announce that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine works. Polio has killed thousands of people each year for centuries, paralyzed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and confined thousands to iron lungs.

American agronomist Norman Borlaug spent years and decades crossbreeding wheat, corn, and rice until he developed extremely productive and resilient crops. By combining these species with modern cultivation techniques, Borlaug transformed countries like Mexico, India, and Pakistan from starving countries into net exporters of wheat, corn, and rice in just a few years, doubling or tripling yields per hectare.

Churchill resigns. Sir Winston Churchill, the English statesman who led Great Britain and the Allies during World War II, resigns as prime minister. Churchill, a valiant fighter in the Boer War from 1899 to 1902, had held various government and military positions and in 1940 was called to lead a coalition government. When Great Britain found itself alone in the face of Hitler, Churchill incited the British people to a strenuous resistance and skillfully orchestrated the alliance between Roosevelt and Stalin that ultimately overthrew the Axis powers. In 1945, Labour won the postwar elections, and Churchill became leader of the opposition, only to be re-elected prime minister in 1951. In 1953, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He served as a Member of Parliament until 1964 and died the following year.

In 1955, Jacuzzi began selling the J-300 model.

James Dean wears blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause. Jeans had also been worn on the big screen by Marlon Brando in “Wild One” (1953) and by John Wayne in Stagecoach (1939).

The three-body problem was attacked head-on by Andrei Kolmogorov, who outlined the guidelines for its treatment. His program was completed by Vladimir Arnold and Jurgen Moser in 1962 in the so-called KAM theorem. Henri Poincaré had already tackled the problem at the end of the 19th century, with a topological study of nonlinear differential equations and the apparently chaotic behavior of their solutions depending on small changes in the initial conditions, intuiting that the problem was linked to number theory, and in particular to small divisors with large coefficients.

Andrei Kolmogorov dusts off the three-body problem

GL Pearson, CS Fuller, and DM Chapin produce the first solar cell at Bell Labs

GC Devol develops the project of a ‘programmed parts handler’, American patent for the project in 1961. Devol also introduces the name Universal Automation later shortened to UNIMATION, the first robotics company

British inventor C.W. Kenward applies for a patent for a robot design, patent in 1957

IBM produces the 650, the first mass-produced computer with 120 installations in the first year

Luigi Romersa publishes an account in France claiming he was present during a nuclear test (probably a dirty bomb) in the Baltic Sea (the island of Rügen), as Mussolini’s envoy and with Hitler’s approval, in October 1944. However, the news is largely ignored for the next half century, only to resurface when Romersa, late in his life, is interviewed and raises the issue. Evidence of the test having taken place will be found.

The first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, is launched at the US base in Groton.

Mathematician Derek Lawden mathematically describes the flyby

Construction of the second Aswan Dam, commissioned by Nasser with Soviet financial support

Hugh Everett begins writing his doctoral thesis in quantum mechanics

2:30 a.m. Enrico Fermi dies in his sleep of a heart attack (he had been suffering from stomach cancer for two months) at the age of 54. He is buried in Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery.

The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was amended to grant Allied personnel access to American nuclear weapons. The Soviets protested vigorously, because less than ten years before the end of the war, it would give the Germans the power to use nuclear weapons against the Russians. The Americans had to assure the Soviets that the custody of the atomic warheads would remain under American control.

Condoleeza Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the only child of John Wesley Rice Jr., a Presbyterian priest, and Angelena Ray. Her unusual given name, Condoleezza, derives from the Italian expression used in classical music, “con dolcezza” (with sweetness).

The first U-2 prototype is in flight. The secret project is called AQUATONE, and had been approved only eight months earlier. It would be the protagonist of hundreds of flights over the Soviet Union. But fierce Soviet opposition and the downing of one of these flights would lead to the program’s end, and an exclusive focus on spy satellites.

Hungary: Nagy forces reforms

Trieste returns to Italy: the issue takes center stage internationally; Tito threatens armed intervention.

The London Memorandum is signed: for the Trieste Zone, Zone A goes to Italy and Zone B to Yugoslavia. Tito tries to obtain better terms until the very end, and the final settlements are facilitated by the American offer of non-repayable financing and raw materials to build a port in Yugoslavia’s Zone B. The Italian government initially resists the plan, but is then persuaded by the Americans.

Shockley, one of the fathers of the transistor, is going through a midlife crisis. After nursing his wife through cancer, he leaves her, finds a girlfriend, marries her, quits Bell Labs, buys a sports car, and starts a company.

The advent of the first transistor radios wasn’t just a marketing and electronics event. It was a socio-cultural one: the radio became a personal object, and everyone listened to the music they wanted. This brought enormous success to rock ‘n’ roll in the West and beyond.

When Pat Haggerty, Executive VP of Texas Instruments, tries to convince RCA (the big name in tabletop radio) to make a portable transistor radio, RCA responds that “consumers don’t need portable radios.”

The first transistors were sold by Texas Instruments to the US military for 16 USD each.

CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) is founded in Geneva. It was born from an idea by French physicist Louis de Broglie in the post-war period. Twelve Western European nations ratified the treaty. These were nations that had been at war with each other until just nine years earlier: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Great Britain, and Yugoslavia. Unlike similar American government laboratories, the results produced at CERN will always be publicly available.

Enrico Fermi returned to Europe for the second time after the war. He traveled to Paris, the Alps, and gave physics lectures in Varenna on Lake Como, where he also met Heisenberg. But Enrico Fermi began to experience obvious health problems: he had difficulty swallowing and lost his appetite. He had to vomit several times at dinner, and he lost the energy and enthusiasm for the mountain hikes he had always enjoyed. Enrico led a private seminar for Edoardo Amaldi, his son Ugo Amaldi, and his own son Giulio Fermi. The seminar focused on how to program the new computers in machine language. It was Fermi’s last lecture before his death. Returning to Chicago, he immediately went for a check-up. The doctor diagnosed him with stomach cancer and gave him six months to live. His wife, Laura, returned from her diagnosis and met Leona Libby. He didn’t need to say anything: Libby understood the bad news just by looking at Laura. Anderson and Chandrasekhar were among the first scientists to visit him. Segrè would later recount that Fermi spoke of his impending death with “Socratic serenity.” Fermi asked for his old friend Edward Teller to come to Chicago, arriving a few days later.

Soviet Union. By order of Nikita Khrushchev, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Georgy Malenkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, a test was ordered that was then kept secret until 1993. During a military exercise held at the testing site, at an altitude of approximately 350 meters, a bomb with a yield of 40 kilotons was detonated after being dropped from an altitude of 8,000 meters by a Tupolev Tu-4 strategic bomber. Soldiers on the ground were led to believe that the device merely simulated a real atomic bomb and that there would be no radioactive fallout. The approximately 45,000 soldiers were positioned in trenches located between 2.5 and 5 kilometers from ground zero, the blast’s location. Marshal Georgy Zhukov himself, the hero of World War II, wanted to take an active part in the exercise, remaining inside the command bunker at the time of the explosion to test the effects of the shock wave. About forty minutes later, the soldiers, supported by 320 aircraft and 600 ground vehicles, were ordered to advance into the test area, simultaneously conducting military exercises, reconnaissance, and artillery bombardments, which brought them to within just over 500 meters of the blast site. Only in 1993 did the entire exercise become public knowledge, thanks to the interest of Tamara Zlotnikova, a former member of the Russian State Duma: it was her investigations that first breached the Iron Curtain of Totskoye: even today, more than half a century later, no one knows how many of the soldiers who took part in the exercise fell ill and died in the following days, months, and years from the devastating effects of radiation.

United States. The Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP) meets for the first time (it would meet 307 more times during the Cold War). This is a body serving the American defense and intelligence community (essentially the CIA and company). The meeting is significant because it marks a historic turning point: the United States will henceforth rely heavily on technology for espionage and counterespionage. Polaroid founder Edwin “Din” Land is appointed to lead the group.

Alcide De Gasperi dies. Alcide De Gasperi was one of the founders and leader of the Christian Democrats, in which he participated since writing a pamphlet entitled “Reconstructive Ideas of Christian Democracy” in 1943. Before Fascism, he had been a member of parliament for the Popular Party.

Soviet Union. Kengir Gulag uprising in Kazakhstan. This is the gulag where Alexander Solzhenitsyn was held. After the uprising, on June 25th, T-34 tanks and strafing planes arrived, followed by special forces. The dead and wounded numbered approximately six hundred. In the fall of 1955, the survivors were put on trial, behind closed doors. As Robert Burns said: an uprising cannot end in triumph; if it wins, it is given another name.