New Technologies in
the Summer of 1959
By Frederik Nebeker, IEEE History Center
Fifty years
ago, the summer of 1959 was an exciting time
for electrical and computer technologies. On
June 3rd, President Dwight Eisenhower sent a
message to Canadian Prime Minister John
Diefenbaker by means of a radio signal
bounced off the moon. At the time, this
technological tour de force evoked smiles
for the absurdity of sending a message
across the border by way of the moon. Today,
of course, our telephone calls routinely
travel up to satellites and back. In that
summer of 1959, the space race was under
way, and the United States launched half a
dozen satellites and sent two monkeys into
space. (They returned unharmed.)
One of the
monkeys sent into space in 1959 (US Army
photo).
In June 1959,
the first transistorized portable TV, the
Philco Safari, came on the market. It did
not sell well, unlike the transistor radios
that had appeared five years earlier. The
transistor was, for most applications, a
great advance over the electron tube, and in
1959 an even more momentous advance had
begun: the development of the integrated
circuit. Early in the year, Jack Kilby of
Texas Instruments had filed a patent for an
integrated circuit, and in July, Robert
Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor showed how
to make the technology practical in his
patent for the planar process of IC
manufacture.
Postwar
economic growth meant that families were
acquiring more and more home appliances, and
in the 1950s, these appliances became more
sophisticated technologically and more
flamboyant stylistically. The backsplash of
a stove, for example, might resemble a car's
instrument panel, and a new Sunbeam
Mixmaster looked something like a rocket
ship. It was in July of 1959 that such
consumer goods were displayed for Russian
citizens at an exhibition in Moscow, and
Vice President Richard Nixon used the
appliances as arguments for the superiority
of the American system in an impromptu, and
soon famous, "kitchen debate" with Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon said that
the appliances eased the burden on the U.S.
housewife; Khrushchev replied that in the
Soviet Union women were not confined to the
stove.
Nuclear power
was another technology that, in the summer
of 1959, made people optimistic about the
future. In the United States, it came to
submarines in 1954, allowing them to travel
submerged for long periods, and it came to
civilian power stations in 1957. In July
1959, the first nuclear-powered merchant
ship, the SS Savannah, was launched. In this
application, however, the technology proved
impractical, and only three other
nuclear-powered cargo ships were ever built.
The summer of
1959 saw two important computer advances.
One was the development of COBOL, a standard
programming-language for business
applications. The effort, promoted by Grace
Hopper, began in late May and was completed
in November. The 1950s and early 1960s was
the era of so-called mainframe computers,
huge machines that only government agencies,
universities or large businesses could
afford. A way to make such a machine
available to many people simultaneously was
time-sharing, in which people used terminals
that received the computer's attention for a
split second in sequence. The first public
description of a time-sharing system may
have been that given by Christopher Strachey
at a UNESCO conference in Paris in June
1959, though it took a year or two before
such systems were realized.
Grace Hopper,
promoter of the computer language COBOL
(Sperry Corporation photo).
Finally, it was
at the end of the summer of 1959 that the
Xerox 914 came on the market. There were
already wet-film photocopiers, but the Xerox
914, whose name comes from xeros,
Greek for dry, was a more practical
device. (The "914" comes from the ability of
the machine to copy originals as large as 9
inches by 14 inches.) Soon such machines
were ubiquitous in the business world.
Yes, with
communications, space technology,
electronics, home appliances, nuclear power,
computers, and office machines, the
engineers were busy fifty years ago this
summer.
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