The World in the Year 1950

Podcast Transcript

In the year 1950, the world was halfway through the 20th century.

In the 25 years prior, the world had seen the greatest economic downturn in modern history and the greatest war the world had ever known.

New technologies were being developed, and many previous technologies were making their way into the hands of regular people, radically transforming their lives.

On top of all of that, the entire world was about to embark on a total reordering of the geopolitical order.

Learn more about the world in the year 1950 and the changes that occurred over the previous 25 years on the 1,950th episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

My series on the state of the world on anniversary episodes of the podcast is now at 1950. I began in the year 1500 and made updates every 100 episodes, but once we entered the 20th century, I had to do it every 25 episodes because the rate of change had become so rapid.

So what happened since 1925? Oh, not much. Just the greatest war the world had ever seen, which is exactly the same thing I said in the 1925 episode, and the Great Depression.

I’m not going to spend too much time on the Second World War because it has been the subject of many previous episodes. Likewise, I’m not going to get into the details of the Great Depression.

Rather, I’m going to focus on how those events, and others, shaped the world as it was in 1950.

There were few major political changes in Oceania, Latin America, or Africa. Most colonies in 1925 were still colonies in 1950.

One major exception was South Africa, which became fully independent of Britain in 1934 and implemented its system of apartheid in 1948, which enforced legal racial segregation and a system of legal racial preferences.

Japan, having lost the war, was occupied by the United States, which was to control the country for another two years.

In June of 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, which began the Korean War.

In 1949, China became the People’s Republic of China with the communists emerging victorious in a civil war with Nationalist forces, which fled to the island of Taiwan.

Over the past 25 years, a host of countries in Asia have become independent.

Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria all gained independence after the mandates imposed upon them following the end of the First World War.

In one of the first major decisions made by the United Nations, it approved the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, which immediately led to war amongst its neighbors the next day.

In Europe, countries in the East were under Soviet control, with puppet governments having been established after the war. Iceland became formally free of Denmark in 1944, and Ireland became a Republic in 1949.

The big trend of the post-war period was the end of colonization. By 1950, only a few countries had become independent after having their colonial status lifted, but they were major ones.

In 1946, the Philippines gained independence from the United States. India, the largest colony in the British Empire, was partitioned into two countries, India and Pakistan, both of which became independent simultaneously in 1947.

Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, both gained independence in 1948.

Indonesia forcefully gained its independence from Dutch rule in 1949 and was formally recognized as an independent nation in 1950.

These countries were only first in what would become a flood of newly independent countries over the next several decades.

Despite the incredible loss of life from the various wars of the period, the world grew from roughly 2.0 billion people in the mid-1920s to about 2.5 billion by 1950. Population growth accelerated during the last few years in the period due to a decrease in death rates.

Global life expectancy at birth rose from the late 30s in the 1920s to the mid-40s by 1950, however, life expectancy in developed nations was around 65 to 70 years.

Gains came from declines in infant mortality, wider vaccination and sanitation, antibiotics like penicillin and streptomycin, and better nutrition. The Great Depression and World War II caused setbacks in some parts of the world, but the overall trend was upward.

Many of the technologies that had been developed earlier in the 20th century had become widespread by 1950.

In 1925, most cities in the United States had electricity, but only about one in ten farms did. New Deal rural electrification programs flipped this ratio. By 1950, approximately 90 percent of U.S. farms had access to electricity, and urban coverage was essentially universal.

Western Europe’s cities were largely electrified by the late 1930s, with rural areas lagging and electrification resuming after the war. Japan’s urban electrification was high by the late 1930s. Large parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America still had limited rural access in 1950, though grids were expanding.

Refrigerators were Rare in the mid-1920s, but by 1950, roughly 80 percent of U.S. households had one, thanks to reliable compressors and falling prices.

Washing machines and vacuums were niche items in homes in the 1920s. By 1950, approximately two-thirds to three-quarters of U.S. homes owned an electric washer and a vacuum cleaner.

Radio went from a novelty to near-universal ownership by 1940.

In the United States, passenger cars rose from the low 20 million in the late 1920s to about 40 million by 1950, with wartime rationing causing a temporary dip. Paved roads, service stations, and suburban housing grew accordingly.

The global car fleet expanded from roughly 30 million around 1930 to approximately 50 million by 1950, as Europe rebuilt production after the war and new assembly plants emerged in Latin America and parts of Asia.

Economically, the United States accounted for a disproportionately large share of the world’s industrial output. Other industrial economies were in ruins or had been exhausted by the war. The US also ran the dollar-gold anchor of the Bretton Woods System, which I covered in a previous episode.

In addition to the economic strength of the US, the country was experiencing the beginnings of what would become known as the baby boom, which has impacted American demographics to the present day.

In Western Europe, recovery accelerated under the Marshall Plan. Politics in countries like Italy and France were balanced among Christian Democrats, socialists, and communist parties. The European Convention on Human Rights was signed in 1950, marking a significant milestone in the establishment of a new legal framework.

The end of the war saw an increase in international and multilateral institutions.

Most notably, the United Nations was formed in 1945, and the aforementioned Bretton Woods Agreement was enacted in 1944.

The first steps towards European unity also began in the post-war period. After two great wars, most European countries were determined never to see another war in Europe again.

The Western Union military alliance was formed in 1948, but it was replaced by NATO in 1949.

The Organization for European Economic Co-operation was founded in 1948, and the Council of Europe was founded in 1949. Both of these were precursors of what would become the European Community and later the European Union.

1950 marked the beginning of the Cold War. This was the conflict that would define most of the rest of the century. The Berlin Airlift in 1948 and 1949 marked the end of cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies.

The Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949, becoming the second nuclear power after the United States.

This escalation began with the start of the Korean War, the first major open conflict of the Cold War. The first Indochina War began in 1946 between Vietnamese communist forces and France. This conflict would evolve into one of the most significant hotspots in the entire history of the Cold War.

The late 40s also saw the development of several technologies that existed by the year 1950, but were not yet widespread or well-developed.

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, was built in 1945 and is considered the first programmable, general-purpose electronic computer.

By 1950, other programmable computers had been built. Manchester Baby was completed in 1948 at the University of Manchester, which was the first computer to electrically store its programs.

Cambridge, England, and Massachusetts both had computers, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer was launched at the University of Melbourne in 1950.

At the time, all of these computers were enormous and inefficient, but they were a precursor to things to come.

The transistor was invented in 1947 by a team at Bell Labs, which I covered in a previous episode.

The transistor would replace the vacuum tube and would go on to revolutionize electronics, and it was the basis for the integrated circuit, which would be developed several years later.

Another major technology that was just being rolled out in 1950 was the television.

Philo Farnsworth achieved all-electronic image transmission in 1927, the BBC began regular TV service in 1936, and RCA showcased television technology at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

After 1945, mass production, standards, and more powerful transmitters transformed TV into a household technology.

By 1950, approximately 9 percent of U.S. households owned a television, all of which were black-and-white with screens ranging from 10 to 12 inches in diameter.

The number one show in 1950 was Texaco Star Theatre, airing on NBC, which achieved a Nielsen rating of about 61.6 during the 1950-51 season.

Another major revolution was about to transform culture and entertainment. The late 1940s saw the recording of the first songs that could be considered rock and roll, or at least proto-rock and roll.

“Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris and “Boogie Chillen’” by John Lee Hooker were released in 1948.

“Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston, “The Fat Man” by Fats Domino, and “Saturday Night Fish Fry” by Louis Jordan were all released in 1949.

While there is plenty of debate about whether there were early rock and roll songs, they certainly laid the foundation for the rock and roll revolution that would be unleashed in the 1950s.

Magnetic tape, which had been developed in Germany in 1928, was now being released for commercial use. The use of magnetic tape for recording music marked a fundamental leap in the quality of musical recording.

Music recorded on magnetic tape from the early 1950s can still be found on vinyl or compact disc, whereas lower-quality recordings from before this period are almost never made available.

The movie industry was also on the verge of revolution. While color films had been released as early as the 1930s, they were still rather uncommon.

There was also experimentation with anamorphic lenses and wide-format movies. The combination of color and wide-format film ushered in a period of high-quality epic films in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia.

Still photography was also making massive strides. Photography advanced with 35 mm cameras, Kodachrome color film in 1935, and the instant Polaroid Land Camera in 1948.

These advancements made cameras something that most families could afford to capture memories.

Culturally, Jim Crow laws still prevailed in much of the United States; however, the first steps were being taken in the struggle for Civil Rights. In 1948, President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which integrated the US Armed Forces and abolished discrimination “on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin” in the military.

The year 1950 was a pivotal time in history. The completion of the Second World War marked the end of one era and the start of another. With new technologies and inventions, changes to culture, and a strengthening of the Cold War, the world would undergo radical changes over the next 25 years.