Did You Know?
A few small milestones in American culture
Computer Talk
In the '50s, computers spoke in numbers and letters that programmers had to enter by hand, making even simple calculations take hours. Worse, every computer model spoke a different language. Then IBM employee John Backus and colleagues developed a system that translated a more literal series of words into a language called FORTRAN, short for "formula translating." The system, which debuted in 1957, sped up the programming process many times over and opened up computer programming to a much wider audience.
Flinging It
The Frisbee has many fathers: the film canister lids that were thrown around by Hollywood camera crews in the '30s and '40s, the coffee can tops adapted by California kids, and the pie tins from the Frisbie Baking Co. of Bridgeport, Conn., favored by Yalies in the '20s. But only the Wham-O Manufacturing Co. of San Gabriel, Calif., has the patent for the flying saucer beloved by college kids and dogs. Wham-O produced the first plastic version of the popular disk in 1957, calling it the "Pluto Platter" and, later, the Frisbee.
Climate Change
The modern concept of global warming began with a 1957 article in the journal Tellus by oceanographer Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, a chemist, who made the then controversial claim that humans were pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than the oceans could absorb it. The oceans do consume large amounts of CO2, but the researchers found that they did so far more slowly than believed. That meant lingering carbon dioxide would increase the atmosphere's greenhouse effect on the Earth's temperature.
Instant O.J.
Food scientist William A. Mitchell, the inventor of Pop Rocks Candy and several Jell-O products, spent two years developing an orange powder that when mixed with water turned into a vitamin-rich drink. The result was Tang. First sold by General Foods Corp. in 1957, the drink really took off when astronauts had it aboard the Gemini 4 space mission in 1965. Today, Tang is no longer consumed in space, but it's sold in 60 countries and in more than 30 flavors.
Sharks and Jets
Some told composer Leonard Bernstein not to waste his time with a story of gang warfare, racism, and murder. "Who wanted to see a show in which the first-act curtain comes down on two dead bodies?" he told Rolling Stone magazine. But along with Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins, he produced a hit with 1957's West Side Story. A modern-day Romeo and Juliet, featuring warring hoodlums on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the musical dared producers to explore darker topics for years to come.
Defining an Era
Over three weeks in his New York City apartment, Jack Kerouac typed the 120-foot scroll that would become On the Road, the celebrated 1957 novel that exemplified the Beat Generation. The autobiographical story, written in a stream-of-consciousness style, chronicles the adventures of two pals—Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty—as they travel from New York to Mexico City. Kerouac died at age 47 in 1969 from complications of alcoholism. His scroll was purchased for $2.4 million by Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts.
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