1950s Facts

In 1955, Bob Hawke was immortalized by the Guinness Book of Records for chugging 2.5 pints of beer in 11 seconds while at Oxford University.

In the 1950s, the US government placed beer next to an atomic bomb blast to determine if it was still drinkable. The result: in the event of a nuclear war, beer is safe to drink!

Art Ingels built Indy 500-winning race cars at Kurtis Kraft. In 1956 he welded scrap tubing into a chassis in his Echo Park garage, bolted on a surplus West Bend engine, and brought it to the Rose Bowl parking lot. Other racers followed with homemade karts of their own. He is credited with building the first go-kart. One of karting's biggest US races still runs on a track across a parking lot, in Las Vegas.

A converted oil tanker left Port Newark in 1956 with 58 steel boxes on its deck. The man behind it ran trucks, not ships. Malcom McLean bought a steamship line so cranes could lift his loaded trailers aboard. In 1963 his company gave the box corner patents away, royalty free, so rivals could copy them. Every container lifted onto a ship today still locks into those corners.

In a single day in 1952, the people of Moses Lake, Washington, built a whole farm for a stranger. From one minute past midnight, more than 50 tradesmen raised a seven-room house by floodlight while about 100 men on 25 tractors leveled and planted 63.5 acres. By day's end it belonged to Donald Dunn, a WWII tank driver whose Kansas farm a flood had wiped out.

Harry deLeyer arrived late to a 1956 horse auction. He paid $80 to save a gray plow horse already headed for the dog food factory. He later sold the horse to a neighbor. The horse jumped five foot fences again and again just to walk home. So deLeyer bought him back. Two years after that auction, Snowman was the national show jumping champion. He won it again the next year.

Zebco is the push-button fishing reel your dad handed you. Its maker, the Zero Hour Bomb Company, made oil-well bombs - until its patents ran out. In 1947, Texas watchmaker R.D. Hull brought a fix: a board of nails and a coffee-can lid, an idea from a grocery clerk pulling string off a spool. It worked, and the bomb company renamed itself Zebco: ZEro hour Bomb COmpany. Someone is still handing one to a kid right now.