1950..........1960

1950

• 1950, during the first months of the Korean War. Although war was never formally declared, the three-year conflict in Korea escalated to the point where soldiers from 20 nations were involved. About 1.3 million South Koreans died, many of them civilians, along with 1 million Chinese, 500,000 North Koreans, 54,000 Americans, and smaller numbers of British, Australian, and Turkish soldiers.

1952

• Nasser Promotes  Arab Power
  Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser seizes power in Egypt and promotes pan-Arabism

• Mousetrap Snares Brits
  British novelist and playwright Agatha Christie stages her play, The Mousetrap in Great Britain.
  

1953

• Climbers Conquer Everest
  New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norkay become the first to reach the summit of the world's tallest mountain.
  
  

1954

• French Lose Vietnam
  Vietnamese guerrilla troops hand French troops a
  massive defeat at the Battle of Dienbienphu, ending French colonialism in Southeast Asia.
  

1955

• Jonas Salk (1914-1995) displays the polio vaccine he developed in his University of Pittsburgh laboratory. Salk, a physician and epidemiologist, began working on the vaccine in 1947 and became a popular hero when it was released in 1955. Some of the enthusiasm waned when it was announced that a batch of improperly manufactured vaccine had caused polio in scores of children. Albert Sabin introduced a safer vaccine in 1960, and the incidence of polio all but vanished in industrialized nations.

• 
  Pioneer animator Walt Disney (1901-1966) introduced his most famous character, Mickey Mouse, in Steamboat Willie (1928), the first animated cartoon with sound. A year later, he founded the Walt Disney Co., and by 1955, a new concept in entertainment was launched in Anaheim, California: Disneyland, an adventure theme part that looked for fun in the past as well as in Tomorrowland. Ever the innovator, Disney also debuted the first color TV series in 1961: Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color.

• 
  The sign from the first McDonald's franchise, opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. Brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald premiered the fast-food restaurant in San Bernardino, California, and sold franchise rights to Ray Kroc soon thereafter. Within four years, Kroc had opened over 200 McDonald's nationwide. He added the familiar golden arches in 1962 and continued to expand and innovate. By the mid-1990s, a new McDonald's was opening somewhere in the world about every three hours.

1956

• Elvis Presley (1935-1977), wearing a hat but no shirt, holds one of his first records, "That's All Right, Mama," released in 1954, when he was only 19. Elvis was a certified teen idol by 1956, when he had four hit singles, sold more than 362,000 copies of his first album, starred in the film Love Me Tender, and made the first of his three legendary appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. He went on to become the most successful recording artist in history, with 83 pop hits over the next 16 years.

• Soviets Crush Hungary
  Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rumble into Hungary and crush an anti-communist revolt.
  

1957

• Laika, the Russian space dog, prepares to become the first living creature to orbit Earth, in 1957. On October 4, the Soviet Union stunned the world with the launch of Sputnik I, a small satellite that became the first manmade object to orbit the planet. One month later, on November 4, they launched Sputnik II, which carried Laika into space and tracked the dog's biomedical data. The Soviets' early space success, coupled with initial American failure, initiated the space race of the 1960s.

1958

• Police officers in Montgomery, Alabama, arrest Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on charges of loitering, September 4, 1958. King, who gained national fame as a leader of the boycott of Montgomery's segregated bus system, was waiting near a courtroom where one of his associates was testifying. He said he was beaten and choked by the arresting officers; they denied the charges. King, the most widely admired black leader of the century, was arrested many times for his efforts to promote racial equality.

• Great Leap Backward in China
  Chinese Communist Chairman Mao Tse-tung initiates the Great Leap Forward, a grassroots economic program that fails miserably and causes widespread chaos and death.
  

1959

• Chinese Crush Tibetan Uprising
  Outnumbered Tibetan rebels fighting for their region's independence clash with Chinese troops and artillery. Some 80,000 Tibetans die in the fighting.

• 
  Microchip Paves Way for PCs
  Texas Instruments engineers invent the microchip, a silicon chip that can house an integrated circuit. The invention paves the way for microprocessing and the personal computer revolution.