50 Fun Facts About 1952

Which computer called the Republican landslide on CBS's election night so early that the network sat on its forecast?

UNIVAC put Eisenhower's odds at 100 to 1 from a 5.5 per cent sample, so the CBS crew quietly reworked the figures into a close race before admitting the machine had been right.

Whose 'Auf Wiederseh'n, Sweetheart' spent nine weeks at number one in America, a first for any British act?

Vera Lynn's nine-week run at the top stood as the record for a British act on the American chart until the Beatles matched it with 'Hey Jude' in 1968.

Which motel chain, begun on Summer Avenue in Memphis, took its name from a Bing Crosby film as its architect's joke?

Holiday Inn founder Kemmons Wilson built it after a miserable family road trip to Washington, and the joke name that architect Eddie Bluestein gave the plans simply stuck.

Which toy, the first ever advertised on television, was sold as loose parts to stick into a real vegetable until 1964?

Mr. Potato Head's first commercial, on 30 April, was also the first aimed at children; Hasbro only added a plastic potato body after complaints about rotting vegetables.

Which Argentine first lady, named 'Spiritual Leader of the Nation' on her 33rd birthday in May, died of cancer in July?

Eva Perón's embalmed body was put on display, then vanished for 16 years after the 1955 coup; the military eventually found it buried in Milan under a false name.

Which magazine printed The Old Man and the Sea complete in one issue that sold 5.3 million copies in two days?

Life's Labor Day issue of 1 September carried the whole novella; it won Hemingway his first Pulitzer the next spring and was the only work the Nobel committee named in 1954.

Which Czech runner won the 5,000 m, 10,000 m and the marathon at Helsinki, never having run a marathon before?

Emil Zátopek's wife Dana won the javelin within an hour of his 5,000 m victory, and he later claimed at her press conference that his win had 'inspired' her.

Which film star, sailing to London for the premiere of Limelight, was told his US re-entry permit had been revoked?

Charlie Chaplin never tried to go back, settling at Corsier-sur-Vevey above Lake Geneva; Limelight was boycotted in America and only won its Oscar, for the score, in 1973.

Which codebreaker, convicted of gross indecency in March, accepted oestrogen injections as the alternative to prison?

Alan Turing had reported a burglary at his Manchester home and admitted the relationship to the police himself; the conviction also barred him from entering the United States.

In whose King's College lab did Raymond Gosling take Photo 51, the X-ray image of DNA that Wilkins later showed Watson?

Rosalind Franklin had set the image aside to concentrate on DNA's 'A' form, and it reached Watson without her knowledge as she was preparing to leave King's.

Which occupied country regained sovereignty on 28 April under a peace treaty 48 nations signed and the Soviets refused?

Japan's treaty, signed at San Francisco the previous September, also ended its empire; Czechoslovakia and Poland joined the Soviet Union in refusing to sign it.

In which city did police fire on students marching for their language on 21 February, a date UNESCO marks worldwide?

Dhaka's students were defying a ban on gatherings to demand Bengali as a state language of Pakistan; UNESCO declared 21 February International Mother Language Day in 1999.

Which king abdicated on 26 July, three days after the Free Officers' coup, in favour of his six-month-old son?

Farouk sailed into exile on the royal yacht Mahrousa, the same vessel that had carried the deposed Ismail the Magnificent to Italy in 1879; the baby was proclaimed Fuad II.

Which Illinois governor, pictured with a hole in his shoe sole while campaigning, won just nine states in November?

Adlai Stevenson answered Republican jibes with 'Better a hole in the shoe than a hole in the head'; Flint Journal photographer William Gallagher won the 1953 Pulitzer for the picture.

Which first Black Oscar winner, who died in October, was refused burial in the Hollywood Cemetery she had chosen?

Hattie McDaniel, the Mammy of Gone with the Wind, was buried at Rosedale instead; the Hollywood cemetery offered a reburial in 1999 and, when her family declined, built her a cenotaph by its lake.

Which widescreen process, using three projectors and a curved screen, opened on Broadway with a roller-coaster ride?

Cinerama's 146-degree picture needed three projection booths, so few cinemas could install it; its first film, This Is Cinerama, opened at the Broadway Theatre on 30 September.

Which challenger, floored in round one by Jersey Joe Walcott, took the heavyweight title with a 13th-round knockout?

Rocky Marciano was behind on the scorecards after twelve rounds and needed a stoppage; the overhand right that ended it was voted the greatest knockout ever in a 2006 ESPN poll.

Whose 'Here in My Heart' topped the first UK singles chart, a Top 12 the NME compiled by telephoning about 20 shops?

Al Martino stayed at number one for nine weeks, a consecutive-run record that only eight other records have since beaten; it was his only UK chart-topper.

Which glove-puppet bear, bought by Harry Corbett in Blackpool in 1948, first appeared on BBC television on 16 January?

Sooty's first outing was on the BBC talent show Talent Night; Corbett resigned as an engineer when his employer refused him Saturdays off, and the bear got his own series in 1955.

Which two terracotta puppets, who spoke 'Oddle-Poddle' and lived either side of Little Weed, first aired in December?

Bill and Ben were the Flower Pot Men of Watch with Mother; Peter Hawkins voiced both and invented their gibberish, translating scripts that were written in plain English.

Which wartime document, which Britons had to show a policeman on demand, stopped being compulsory on 21 February?

Identity cards went after a 1950 test case in which Harry Willcock refused to produce his for a policeman; the National Registration number lived on inside the NHS.

Which staple came off the ration on 5 October after thirteen years, while sugar and sweets stayed rationed into 1953?

Tea came off ration with only two days' notice from the Government; sweets had to wait until February 1953 and sugar until that September.

Which London transport ran for the last time in the early hours of 6 July, cheered into New Cross depot by crowds?

London's electric trams gave way to diesel buses whose exhaust helped thicken that December's Great Smog; not one tram ran in the capital again until Croydon Tramlink opened in 2000.

At which station did a Perth express run into a standing local train, and a third train into the wreckage, killing 112?

Harrow and Wealdstone remains Britain's worst peacetime rail crash; the driver had passed a caution and two danger signals in fog, and the disaster forced through the Automatic Warning System.

Which 1956 Act answered the December fog that seeped into London's cinemas and killed at least 4,000 people?

The Clean Air Act created 'smoke control areas' where only smokeless fuel could be burned; later research put the true death toll at around 12,000, three times the official count.

Which club retained the FA Cup by beating an injury-hit Arsenal 1–0, the goal coming from Chilean-born George Robledo?

Newcastle United's winner made Robledo the first foreigner to score in an FA Cup final; Arsenal ended with seven fit men, and the FA had banned the BBC from televising the match.

Which writer, born in Cambridge on 11 March, joked he had been 'DNA' there nine months before the double helix paper?

Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide began as a 1978 radio comedy before selling 14 million books by the time of his death in 2001; he also wrote for Doctor Who and was its script editor for a season.

Which president was born in Leningrad on 7 October, the youngest of three sons, two of whom died before his birth?

Vladimir Putin's brother Viktor had died of diphtheria and starvation in the 1942 siege of the city; Putin later spent 16 years in the KGB, including a Dresden posting under cover as a translator.

Whose diary was published in America in June, with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt, and became a bestseller?

Anne Frank's diary reached Doubleday only because junior editor Judith Jones pulled it out of the rejection pile; the book had already appeared in German and French in 1950.

Which John Cage piece, premiered by pianist David Tudor at Woodstock, New York, instructs the performer not to play?

4′33″ runs three movements of silence in which the ambient noise is the music; Cage had visited an anechoic chamber expecting to hear nothing and instead heard two sounds, one high and one low.

Which opener became England's first professional Test captain of the century, starting against India at Headingley?

Len Hutton refused to turn amateur as Wally Hammond had done in 1938, and the selectors could find no amateur county captain good enough; he regained the Ashes the following summer.

Which newspaper, its home city still in its title, first put news rather than adverts on its front page in October?

The Guardian was still The Manchester Guardian, a name it kept until 24 August 1959 before moving to London; the Anglican weekly that had owned the plain title had closed in 1951.

What did the Post Office unveil on 1 February to catch the 150,000 households watching television without a licence?

The TV detector van was demonstrated by the GPO, whose engineers wrote up the first three in their own journal; the television licence had been introduced in 1946 at £2 for a single black-and-white BBC channel.

Off which Australian archipelago did Britain explode its first atomic bomb inside the hull of the frigate HMS Plym?

The Monte Bello Islands test, Operation Hurricane, made Britain the third nuclear power; all that remained of Plym was a 'gluey black substance' washed up on Trimouille Island.

Which 19-year-old was hanged for a policeman's murder on a Croydon roof, though 16-year-old Christopher Craig fired?

Derek Bentley's 'Let him have it, Chris' was read by the jury as an order to shoot rather than to surrender the gun; he was pardoned in 1993 and his conviction quashed in 1998.

On which Scottish lake did land-speed record holder John Cobb die when his jet boat Crusader broke up at over 200 mph?

Loch Ness was picked for its long straight water; Cobb, who had set three land-speed records at Bonneville, was 52, and Crusader's wreck was found 200 metres down in 2002.

Which Titanic officer, the most senior to survive, who took his yacht Sundowner to Dunkirk, died during the Great Smog?

Charles Lightoller's chronic heart disease killed him on 8 December, in the week the fog was at its worst; he had been Titanic's second officer and a key witness at both inquiries.

Which new wave frontman, born in Dumbarton on the Clyde on 14 May, adopted an American accent to fit in at school?

David Byrne's family left for Hamilton, Ontario, when he was two and later Maryland, partly over tensions caused by his parents' interfaith marriage; he co-founded Talking Heads in New York in 1975.

Which Metropolitan Police horse carried Elizabeth II at her first Trooping the Colour as monarch on 5 June?

Winston was a chestnut gelding who had carried George VI at the first post-war Trooping in 1947; though named after Churchill, every police horse bought in 1944 was given a 'W' name.

In which country were pillar boxes bearing the new 'EIIR' cypher vandalised, since it had never had an Elizabeth I?

Scotland's first EIIR box, on Edinburgh's Inch estate, was tarred, painted, hammered and finally blown up within three months; Scottish boxes since 1953 carry only the Crown of Scotland.

Which Pacific island ceased to exist on 1 November, vaporised by Ivy Mike, the first full-scale thermonuclear test?

Elugelab left a crater 1.9 km across and 50 m deep in Enewetak Atoll; the Atomic Energy Commission's chairman reported to the president-elect simply that 'the island of Elugelab is missing!'

Which drug, first given to a manic patient in Paris on 19 January and sold as Largactil, began the antipsychotic era?

Chlorpromazine had been tried by surgeon Henri Laborit as an anaesthetic booster; Delay and Deniker's Paris trial on 38 psychotic patients followed, and Largactil reached the market in 1953.

Which device did Geoffrey Dummer, a British radar engineer, first describe in public at a Washington symposium on 7 May?

The integrated circuit stayed on paper for Dummer, who lacked both the active devices and the manufacturing techniques to build one; he later credited Robert Noyce and Jean Hoerni as the true inventors of microelectronics.

Which Aga Khan colt, ridden by Smirke, won the Derby by half a length from Gay Time and then the St Leger?

Tulyar's jockey had wired the Press Club beforehand: 'On Wednesday I will be saying to you What did I Tulyar'; the colt set a record for a season's earnings and was sold to the Irish National Stud.

Which test pilot, reckoned the first Briton through the sound barrier, died when his DH.110 broke up at Farnborough?

John Derry, his observer and 29 spectators died, yet the display went on once the runway was cleared, with Neville Duke taking the Hunter supersonic that same afternoon.

Which Leroy Anderson instrumental topped the Billboard chart and was ranked its number one song of the year?

Blue Tango, written for orchestra in 1951, reached number one in Anderson's own Decca recording; a Ray Martin version also made the first UK singles chart that November.

Which 17-year-old, nicknamed 'Little Mo' after a battleship, beat Louise Brough for her first Wimbledon singles title?

Maureen Connolly went on to three Wimbledon titles in a row and, in 1953, the first women's Grand Slam; a sportswriter had likened her forehand to the firepower of the USS Missouri, 'Big Mo'.

Which FBI agent won the Helsinki steeplechase with a last-lap surge past Soviet record-holder Kazantsev?

Horace Ashenfelter's win prompted jokes about the first American spy to let himself be chased by a Russian KGB agent, since Kazantsev was a KGB officer; he also broke the unofficial world record.

What did the NHS begin charging per prescription on 1 June, a fee Aneurin Bevan had blocked by threatening to resign?

One shilling (5p) was set by Churchill's Conservative government; Harold Wilson's government abolished the charge in 1965, only to bring it back at half a crown in 1968.

To which city did BOAC fly the world's first fare-paying jet airliner service, a de Havilland Comet, on 2 May?

Johannesburg was a five-stop, 21-hour flight; within two years the Comet 1 fleet was permanently grounded after two of the jets were lost over the Mediterranean in 1954.