Word: 1940s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...computers today, from $10 million supercomputers to the tiny chips that power cell phones and Furbies, have one thing in common: they are all "Von Neumann machines," variations on the basic computer architecture that John von Neumann, building on the work of Alan Turing, laid out in the 1940s. Men have become famous for less. But in the lifetime of this Hungarian-born mathematician who had his hand in everything from quantum physics to U.S. policy during the cold war, the Von Neumann machine was almost the least of his accomplishments...
...Oxford team did not stop there. Rushing to meet the needs of World War II, they helped the government set up a network of "minifactories" for penicillin production. Florey also played a crucial role in galvanizing the large-scale production of penicillin by U.S. pharmaceutical companies in the early 1940s. By D-day there was enough penicillin on hand to treat every soldier who needed it. By the end of World War II, it had saved millions of lives...
Hubble's astronomical triumphs earned him worldwide scientific honors and made him the toast of Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s--the confidant of Aldous Huxley and a friend to Charlie Chaplin, Helen Hayes and William Randolph Hearst. Yet nobody (except perhaps Hubble) could have imagined such a future when the 23-year-old Oxford graduate began his first job, in New Albany...
...only recognition that eluded him was a Nobel Prize--and not for lack of effort on his part. He tried everything. In the late 1940s he even hired a publicity agent to promote his cause. Alas, there was no prize for astronomy, and by the time the Nobel committee decided astronomy could be viewed as a branch of physics, it was too late. Insiders say Hubble was on the verge of winning when he died...
...many cases make an epidemic? Survivors of the great polio plagues of the 1940s and '50s will never believe that in the U.S. the average toll in those years was "only" 1 victim out of every 5,000 people. Was that really all it took to scare the nation out of its wits, sending families scurrying in all directions--to the mountains, to the desert, to Europe--in vain hope of sanctuary...