1950's Military Advancements
President Dwight D. EisenhowerFormer WWII general Dwight D. Eisenhower became president of the United States in 1953 until 1961. He ran our country during a critical time in our military history. His support helped contribute to military advancements in computers, aeronautics, space travel, and missile defense systems that made us one of the mightiest countries in the world.
ComputersDuring the 1950s scientists broke new ground in the fields of electronics and space exploration. In the post war years American physicists-John Bardeen, Walter h. Brattain, and William Shockley- developed a tiny device that transmitted electronic signals and made it possible to create miniature radios and calculators. This also helped lead to the invention of the computer. In 1946 scientists working for the military developed the first computer, it was known as the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). Its job was to make military calculations. Several years later the technology grew from just making mathematical calculations to being able to handle business data. This new computer was called the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) and it launched the computer revolution. Early computers focused primarily on data analysis not communication and were huge room size devices but they made it possible to work more quickly and efficiently. As a result, families in the 1950s had more free time and new types of leisure activities became popular.
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ENIACUNIVAC |
Women in Coding
Those who were recruited to become the first computer programmers were picky, precise and detail oriented and what sort of person possesses that kind of mentality? Back then, it was assumed to be women. They had already played a foundational role in the prehistory of computing: During World War II, women operated some of the first computational machines used for code-breaking at Bletchley Park in Britain.
The black and white photo (side) showed smartly dressed women deftly configuring wires on an enormous machine—the first general-purpose all-electronic digital computer. When Kathy Kleiman, a computer programmer and historian, came across these pictures, it was clear to her that these young women knew what they were doing.
“I had been told they were models,” she says. “And of course, they’re not.”
Those women, Kleiman discovered, were the first modern computer coders, or programmers, in the U.S. The two men who had designed the computer, called the ENIAC, had been well-known since 1946. Yet for decades, computer historians had no idea who the women in those photos were, and simply assumed that they had nothing to do with the groundbreaking machine. By the time the six female programmers finally received public recognition, most were in their 70s.
These six women developed the new field of computer programming during World War II, a time when the government was encouraging women to take on wartime jobs while male soldiers fought overseas. Originally, the military had hired them as “computers” to calculate ballistics trajectories by hand. This meant determining the angle soldiers should fire at based on how far away the target was, what the weather conditions were that day, and other factors. By 1945, they were part of nearly 100 female mathematicians working as “computers" and by 1960, according to government statistics, more than one in four programmers were women. At M.I.T.’s Lincoln Labs in the 1960s, most of those the government categorized as “career programmers” were female. It wasn’t high-status work — yet. Programming was often conflated with low-level clerical work commonly performed by women like typing or filing.
These stereotypes about the job helped keep its pay and prestige low. Yet programmer Grace Hopper, who invented the first computer language compiler (which transferred mathematical code into machine code), also used gender stereotypes to encourage women to enter the field. In a 1967 Cosmopolitan article titled “The Computer Girls,” she quipped that programming is “just like planning a dinner.” Hopper continued: “Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.”
The black and white photo (side) showed smartly dressed women deftly configuring wires on an enormous machine—the first general-purpose all-electronic digital computer. When Kathy Kleiman, a computer programmer and historian, came across these pictures, it was clear to her that these young women knew what they were doing.
“I had been told they were models,” she says. “And of course, they’re not.”
Those women, Kleiman discovered, were the first modern computer coders, or programmers, in the U.S. The two men who had designed the computer, called the ENIAC, had been well-known since 1946. Yet for decades, computer historians had no idea who the women in those photos were, and simply assumed that they had nothing to do with the groundbreaking machine. By the time the six female programmers finally received public recognition, most were in their 70s.
These six women developed the new field of computer programming during World War II, a time when the government was encouraging women to take on wartime jobs while male soldiers fought overseas. Originally, the military had hired them as “computers” to calculate ballistics trajectories by hand. This meant determining the angle soldiers should fire at based on how far away the target was, what the weather conditions were that day, and other factors. By 1945, they were part of nearly 100 female mathematicians working as “computers" and by 1960, according to government statistics, more than one in four programmers were women. At M.I.T.’s Lincoln Labs in the 1960s, most of those the government categorized as “career programmers” were female. It wasn’t high-status work — yet. Programming was often conflated with low-level clerical work commonly performed by women like typing or filing.
These stereotypes about the job helped keep its pay and prestige low. Yet programmer Grace Hopper, who invented the first computer language compiler (which transferred mathematical code into machine code), also used gender stereotypes to encourage women to enter the field. In a 1967 Cosmopolitan article titled “The Computer Girls,” she quipped that programming is “just like planning a dinner.” Hopper continued: “Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.”
Programming, some argued, was similar to knitting, sewing, or even crossword puzzles, so women were a perfect fit.
Over time, stereotypes about the field shifted to the point that computer programming came to be seen as a job better suited for men than women. Instead of a job that was perfect for detail-oriented women who loved to collaborate and plan, it became a job for antisocial, “geeky” boys. When professions shift from male-dominated to female-dominated, they usually see decreases in pay and prestige. Teaching and nursing, once considered male fields, are today largely low-paying, pink-collar occupations. In the case of computer programming, this transformation ran in reverse. Although it’s not clear exactly how much programmers earned in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it definitely wasn’t comparable to Google’s $106,900 “early career median pay” of today. Women could be promoted to other technical jobs, but could not advance into “big-money sales and management jobs.” By 1969, the median salary for female computer specialists was $7,763, Abbate writes in Recoding Gender. In contrast, men earned a median of $11,193 as computer specialists and $13,149 as engineers. |
America Looks To Outer Space
Improvements On The Ground
Federal Highway Act of 1956
On June 29, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The bill created a 41,000-mile “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” that would, according to Eisenhower, eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes, traffic jams and all of the other things that got in the way of “speedy, safe transcontinental travel.” At the same time, highway advocates argued, “in case of atomic attack on our key cities, the road net [would] permit quick evacuation of target areas.” For all of these reasons, the 1956 law declared that the construction of an elaborate expressway system was “essential to the national interest.” -History.com
ICBMsIntercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) were first deployed by the United States in 1959 and continue to be a critical weapon in the American nuclear arsenal today. ICBMs had ranges between 6,000 to 9,300 miles, making virtually any target in the world vulnerable. Due to their powerful and deadly nature ICBMs are considered a strategic defensive weapon, though they are purely offensive in nature. The idea is that any nuclear armed opponent will think twice before attacking the United States with nuclear weapons because retaliation will be swift and cause unfathomable destruction. This idea, though never an official American military policy, is known as Mutually Assured Destruction and helped keep an uneasy peace during the Cold War. To learn more about the different types of ICBMs click on the links below. The "Atlas" was the United States first viable ICBM. From 1959-1965 it was deployed at many different Air Force Bases stretching from upper state New York all the way to New Mexico. Three different models of the Atlas, the D, E and F were put in the field. Each one was better than its predecessor, but due to the volatile nature of its liquid fuel the Atlas was retired only six year after coming online.
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