The year 1952 would shape society in many ways.
The first heart bypass device was used in surgery.
UFO sightings were reported in Washington DC.
The National Security Agency was created.
Sexual reassignment surgery was carried out for the first time.
A deadly plane crash killed several people.
And the Supreme Court told the President he didn’t have the power to seize private
property.
So, kind of a hit and miss year.
Let’s get started.
First Mechanical Heart This one was gruesome, but at least had a
positive outcome.
For most of human history, heart problems were almost always fatal.
Medicine simply had no way to correct most issues.
In the 1930s a Russian scientist, Vladimir Demikhov, created an artificial heart.
He tested it on a dog.
The dog’s heart was removed, and the artificial heart was put in its place.
The dog survived for two hours before dying.
Vladimir proved the idea of using a machine to function for the heart was possible.
It would take 15 more years before it was ready for humans.
On July 3, 1952, a 41-year-old man named Henry Opitek began having shortness of breath.
The doctors found a valve in his heart was at fault.
Normally this would be fatal.
But they decided to use a machine to bypass his heart while they surgically corrected
the problem.
The Dodrill-GMR machine was the device they would use.
It was developed by Doctor Forest Dodrill at Harper University Hospital in Detroit and
General Motors Research.
Dodrill connected Henry’s blood vessels to the machine so that it bypassed the heart’s
left ventricle entirely.
While the machine worked to circulate blood, Dodrill fixed the valve.
Once finished, he reconnected Henry’s heart which worked normally.
Henry Opitek became the first person to survive open heart surgery.
He lived until 1981, dying at 70 years old.
Washington, D.C. UFO Incident At 11:40 pm on July 19, an air traffic controller
named Edward Nugent saw something strange.
He suddenly had seven objects show up on his radar that were about fifteen miles away.
His supervisor looked at the radar and saw the same thing Edward did.
The two made sure the radar appeared to be working correctly.
Then they called the control tower and confirmed that they saw the strange objects on radar
too.
Other objects started showing up on radar, and subsequently moved over the White House
and Capitol Building.
The air traffic controllers then called Edwards Air Force Base.
At first, they reported nothing unusual.
Then, an airman called the air traffic controllers and claimed he saw an orange ball on fire
that took off at an incredible speed.
The United States Air Force sent two F-94 Starfire jet fighters to Washington.
At 3 am, right before the jets arrived, all the strange objects disappeared.
When the planes left after running low on fuel, all the strange objects returned.
Some were convinced that UFOs were monitoring radio traffic and timing their arrival accordingly.
The sightings became front page news.
Then UFOs appeared again on the night of July 26.
At 8:15 pm, a stewardess on an incoming flight noticed strange lights above her plane.
Within minutes of her seeing this, radar at the airport and Air Force base began tracking
unknown objects.
Jets were sent over Washington D.C again, and the lights again disappeared when the
planes arrived.
The UFOs became front page news again.
It also caused Harry Truman to want an explanation.
Truman’s aide was told that what was seen on radar could be caused by a temperature
inversion.
A warm layer of air covers a cooler layer of air that is close to the ground.
This bends radar signals and causes false positives.
On July 29, to calm public fears, a large press conference was held at the Pentagon,
the largest since World War II.
The officials explained the temperature inversion theory.
And they also included testimony of other pilots that were flying over the area and
didn’t see anything.
Additionally, one of the targets the air traffic controllers found was later identified as
a steamboat which further supported the idea that radar signals were affected.
The military’s explanation was not widely accepted by many.
A common criticism was why UFO events didn’t occur during other temperature inversion events?
This weather condition happened several times a year and never caused strange objects to
appear before.
Ultimately, the military quit discussing UFO cases it couldn’t solve.
The mystery of what caused strange objects to appear in 1952 has never been solved.
Operation Ivy In the early 1950s, the United States really
enjoyed detonating weapons of mass destruction.
This addiction continued in 1952 with even more explosions at the Pacific Proving Grounds.
Operation Ivy was the eighth series of tests at this location and consisted of two explosions.
The first test was a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon.
When detonated, it yielded 10.4 megatons, almost 500 times as powerful as the bomb dropped
on Nagasaki, Japan.
Eight megatons of that yield were due to fast fission of uranium which created a large
amount of radioactive fallout.
Before the explosion, there was an island.
After the explosion, the island was gone.
In its place was a crater 164 feet deep and 6,240 feet wide.
During the explosion, US Air Force pilot Jimmy Priestly Robinson had a job to do.
He was ordered to fly an F-84G through the mushroom cloud and collect air samples.
He succeeded somehow and emerged from the mushroom cloud.
But he couldn’t pick up the navigational beacons due to electromagnetic interference
from the nuclear explosion.
By the time he found the signals, Robinson was low on fuel.
He eventually ran out of fuel and had to make a water landing.
The plane flipped, and Robinson was killed.
His body was never found.
The second explosion was much less eventful.
It only yielded 500 kilotons and didn’t kill anybody.
At least not right away.
National Security Agency World War II required that the United States
create a unit to decipher coded communications.
This task became more important to National Security as the Cold War progressed and war
broke out in Korea.
President Harry Truman, in 1952, officially established this unit as the National Security
Agency.
Unlike other intelligence agencies, the NSA is not allowed to conduct human based intelligence
gathering.
They focus on acquiring information through communications technology.
And they also aid other government agencies that are not allowed to do this on their own.
Since being established, the National Security Agency is now the largest US Intelligence
Service both in terms of budget and number of people employed.
They are not well regarded today by many people.
But that’s a separate episode.
Christine Jorgensen
Not everything that happened in 1952 was bad.
Doctors first started performing what were then known as “sex change” operations
in the 1920s and 1930s.
Early attempts did not recognize the importance of hormones in the process.
Christine Jorgensen, in 1952, became the first person to undergo the necessary surgeries
while also being treated with hormones.
She unexpectedly became a celebrity because of it.
Jorgensen was raised in New York.
She graduated from high school in 1945 and was drafted into the US Army at 19 years
old.
She returned to New York after leaving the service and attended community college,
photography school, and dental assistant school.
During this time, she heard about sex reassignment surgery and thought it might improve her life.
She began taking estrogen, then researched more about the surgery.
Sweden had the only doctors in the world who would perform the operation, so she headed
there.
During a stopover in Copenhagen, she met a Danish endocrinologist named Christian Hamburger.
He convinced Christine to stay in Denmark and began treating her with hormones.
Then, once the Danish Minister of Justice gave special permission, she began a series
of operations.
After the entire process was completed, Christine returned to New York in February 1953.
She became an instant celebrity.
Because of this she was able to create a successful nightclub act and made numerous appearances
on TV and radio.
She also published an autobiography.
Christine Jorgensen led an active and interesting life.
Unfortunately, she died in 1989 at 62 years old from bladder and lung cancer.
Christine, we celebrate your life.
Moses Lake Crash The United States Air Force had a lot of planes
in the air during the 1950s.
They also had a lot of accidents.
In late December, the Air Force decided to implement Operation: Sleigh Ride, a program
to bring US service members home from the Korean War for Christmas.
On December 20, one of those flights was carrying 115 people from Moses Lake, Washington
to San Antonio, Texas.
The C-124 took off around 6:30 pm.
Seconds after taking off, the left wing struck the ground.
The plane flipped over again and again with parts flying in all directions, until finally
exploding.
Of the 115 people on board, 87 of them died.
Somehow, 28 did survive.
It was the deadliest accident in US territory until another crash happened over the Grand
Canyon in 1956.
1952 Steel Strike On April 9, the United Steelworkers of America
planned to strike against all the steelmaker companies.
Essentially, all steelworkers in the industry were refusing to work until their demands
for higher wages were met.
Wage controls were enforced during World War II, then again during the Korean War.
Wages did not increase while inflation did.
Steelworkers were tired of working more and making less.
President Harry Truman was told that ammunition was low in Korea.
Even a week-long strike would affect production of equipment for the troops, plus it would
delay development of nuclear weapons.
Hours before the walkout, Truman nationalized the steel industry.
His executive order ended any hope of negotiation.
This resulted in several court challenges that eventually ended at the US Supreme Court
on June 2.
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said that the President did not have the authority
to seize private property for national security reasons.
Furthermore, he had no authorization from Congress that allowed him to do this.
The steel companies returned to their owners, and the strike resumed.
It eventually ended with the workers being given what they had originally demanded four
months earlier.
Of course, there are even more things from 1952 that we didn’t mention.
A major earthquake struck Southern California.
Tornadoes in the Mississippi River Valley killed 208 people.
And nearly 58,000 cases of polio were reported in the United States.
To be fair, for those living in this transitional decade any year that didn’t end in nuclear
annihilation was technically a good year.
The 1950s began with nuclear explosions, racism, and preventable accidents.
As the decade progressed, events began to happen which foreshadowed the modern world
to come.
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