Technology advances: 1956 – 1960
The mid-1950s in the United States were years of high optimism, when anything seemed possible, when all the pent-up knowledge and
achievements of the war and postwar periods were about to be exploited. In the
sciences there was a kind of renaissance, the peak of the so-called
interdisciplinary movements, when collaboration among many diverse disciplines
was going on. It was a period of industrial expansion, based largely on the new
technologies that had been incubating since the 1930s. By the late 1950s fields
like electronics and communications had become glamorous, attracting a large
number of engineering students.
“In
the 1950s and 1960s, too, because of the popularization of the fruits of
science and technology, waves of students came into all the nation’s graduate
schools, seeking higher education in these fields. The schools, challenged to
keep up with this deluge, had to resort to extensive recruiting for their
growing staffs. At the same time there was a strong orientation to more
science-based studies, largely a result of war experiences and the continuing
pressures of Cold War research. During this period the United States not only
assumed the role of a major world power, with a concomitant sense of
responsibility, it also became a mecca for learning, especially in the fields
of science and engineering, fields in which the Europeans had excelled in the
decades before the war. (Wildes and Lindgren, A Century of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, 1882-1982, MIT Press, 1985, pp 330-331)
Here is a sample of technological milestones of the period.