Technology

In spite of the Great Depression, the 1930s were increasingly technological times for most Americans. They rode automobiles, trains, and even airplanes. Most had electricity and running water, a few appliances, and access to a telephone. More families had a radio than had a telephone, and even in the midst of the depression, one could find cheap entertainment by going to the movies—sometimes to see color films in an air-conditioned theater. Television broadcasts could be received in New York and Chicago, although only a handful of households had television sets. Electrical devices were becoming more common in physicians’ offices, either for diagnosis or therapy. A host of new consumer products, made cheaply from various chemicals and resins, imitated older, more expensive products or evolved into new forms of commercial design. The 193940 New York World’s Fair gave many Americans the opportunity to celebrate hope for the future based on science and technology. During World War II, the United States government aggressively and deliberately fostered many areas of technology, and trained troops and home-front workers in the most modern methods of production and logistics. This new capacity and knowledge helped fuel postwar prosperity and social change.

While coal and gas still dominated heating, government-sponsored electrification brought service to most Americans by World War II, and to more than half the rural areas by 1946. By 1931, 1 million electric refrigerators had been produced, and electric dishwashers, clothes dryers, and a host of smaller appliances followed rapidly. At war’s end the microwave oven, descended from radar, appeared, as did the fully automatic washing machine, although the former did not become a common household appliance until the 1980s. Air conditioning and refrigeration systems found growing commercial use throughout the 1930s, and began to transform daily life, particularly in the SoUTH.

The automobile entered a mature phase, with styling and options augmenting Henry Ford’s initial austere approach, although Ford still commanded much of the market. Paved roads multiplied, and gasoline engines improved with higher compression, longer life and reliability, and easier maintenance that made driving more accessible to a greater variety of people. The automobile industry alone during the war produced approximately 4 million engines of all types, 6 million guns, 3 million tanks and trucks, and 27,000 aircraft. In agriculture, mechanization proceeded with tractors for small farmers, and huge self-contained combination harvesters and pickers brought economies of scale in food production that fed the war effort and European reconstruction thereafter.

Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 and other impressive feats by famous aviators had demonstrated aviation’s utility and safety. In 1935, the Douglas DC-3 offered middle-class patrons the first truly comfortable air transportation, and this reliable twin-engine aircraft captured 80 percent of domestic service by 1941. Throughout the era, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) operated federal laboratories and cooperated with the aircraet industry to introduce improvements, and the federal government regulated routes, prices, safety, and other areas to help establish civil aviation. Starting well behind even the other allies, the massive U. S. production of aircraft during World War II bequeathed a surplus of planes, pilots, mechanics, and infrastructure to the postwar period. The jet engine, developed just before the war, began to dominate in the 1950s, and by the end of the decade air travel finally surpassed rail in the number of domestic passenger-miles.

Telephone service improved with better switching and transmission, and U. S. telephone access became the highest in the world. Throughout the 1930s commercial radio, which had been launched in 1920, blossomed. Entertainment comedy and drama programs, game shows, daytime soap operas, and news and public affairs filled the programming schedule. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used his famous EIREside chats to inform the country, buoy spirits, and build support for his programs during the depression. All areas of communications technology were targeted for development during the war, and afterward legions of technically adept young developers emerged to make good use of the technology in peacetime. The 1947 invention of the transistor made possible smaller and more portable radio sets and other entertainment and communications devices.

Automated punch card systems and mechanical calculators were commonly used in business and government in the era. Beginning in the late 1930s several electronic computers, using vacuum tubes in place of mechanical switches, were built and found early use during the war in code breaking, ballistics calculations, the atomic bomb project, and other applications. These leviathans were hundreds of feet long, contained tens of thousands of tubes, and consumed about 100 kilowatts of electricity each. In 1946, mathematician John von Neumann, a close adviser to the war effort, added the notion of changeable stored programs to produce the basis for the modern computer, with the construction of a prototype in 1947.

While science underwent dramatic changes in direction and intensity from the interwar years through World

War II, technology enjoyed a more incremental yet no less impressive advance. In the interwar years, it was perceived as fueling prosperity and, with scientific management, as the basis for unlimited possibilities. It was a crucial tool in some New Deal programs. Like scientists, engineers and industrial managers joined the war effort, though typically working somewhat closer to their prewar areas of expertise. Many of the most distinguished and powerful engineers and industrial leaders served as dollar-A-YEAR men and engaged their firms and companies in war mobilization. Crucial engineering refinements, supplanted by applying scientific principles and research in selected areas, led to a panoply of clever and impressive devices that were ready for postwar civilian use.

The thousands of engineers who had worked to develop these devices, and the many thousands more young soldiers who were trained in technology and science to operate them, would form the basis of a postwar social transformation and economic boom. The INTELLIGENcegathering technologies and the many and powerful instruments of war would also find an enduring role to play and opportunities for steady development in the cold war.

See also popular culture.

Further reading: Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Marc Rothenberg, The History of Science and Technology in the United States: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 2001); Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Twentieth-Century Technology, c. 1900-c. 1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

—Joseph N. Tatarewicz

Teheran Conference (November 28-December 1, 1943)

From November 28 to December 1, 1943, U. S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, the “Big Three” leaders of the Grand Alliance fighting the Axis, met in Teheran, Iran. Focusing on major issues of military strategy, geopolitics, and postwar planning, the discussions and decisions at Teheran were important not only for the conduct of World War II but also for the postwar world.

The conference marked the first meeting between Roosevelt and Stalin, and Roosevelt tried hard to establish a good working relationship with the Soviet leader, even staying at the Soviet embassy and sometimes siding with Stalin against Churchill. Reflecting the relative power of the three nations by late 1943, Churchill’s influence was waning, and Roosevelt and Stalin dominated the conference. The clear Allied ascendancy in both the World War II European theater and the World War II Pacific theater by late 1943 underlay the general good spirits at Teheran but also underlined the need to make decisions about the future.

Military discussions primarily involved the long-delayed second ERont in Europe. Stalin, who had long insisted that the United States and Great Britain open the second front to relieve pressure on Soviet forces on the eastern front, demanded that Operation Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion of German-occupied France, take place as soon as possible. At Roosevelt’s insistence, Churchill acquiesced in a date of May 1, 1944, in conjunction with an attack on southern France. The Soviets agreed to launch an eastern offensive at the same time so that the Nazis could not concentrate forces on the new western front. Stalin also indicated that the Soviets would enter the war against Japan (the Soviet Union and Japan were still bound by a neutrality treaty signed in 1941) after the defeat of Germany—a pledge that FDR had long wanted in order to help bring the Pacific war to an end as quickly as possible.

But the geopolitical and postwar issues brought no such agreement—and reflected disagreements and suspicions that would trouble the Grand Alliance for the remainder of the war and lead to its dissolution in the early postwar period. There was some discussion and vague agreement about a postwar world organization, and other issues were addressed as well, but Poland and Germany were central to the agenda. Stalin insisted that the Soviet Union should retain the borders established by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, in particular as they affected Soviet control of eastern Poland and the Baltic states. Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that the Soviet Union might retain the eastern section of Poland, with Poland’s western border extended west into what was then eastern Germany. As to the postwar government of Poland, Stalin refused to recognize the anticommunist Polish government-in-exile in London. Roosevelt explained that the millions of Polish-American voters (and much smaller number of voters from the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) made it difficult for him publicly to acquiesce in their domination by the Soviet Union. Final decisions were left for the future, though it seemed clear enough that the Americans and British would not challenge Soviet interests—or troops—in those areas.

The question of what to do about Germany also loomed large at Teheran, as it would for the remainder of the war and after. Deeply concerned about German power and intentions, the Soviets wanted Germany dismembered into smaller states and left without the economic or military power to threaten other nations. Roosevelt and Churchill did not agree to such draconian action, although they did seem amenable to some dismemberment to weaken Germany. Specific decisions about postwar Germany were left for future resolution.

The major issues discussed at the Teheran conference proved significant to the outcome of World War II and the postwar world. Operation Overlord was the decisive D-day invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The questions left unanswered, in particular those surrounding Poland and Germany, continued to plague the Grand Alliance and Soviet-American relations and were taken up again at the Yalta Conference in early 1945. Although the Teheran Conference from some perspectives marked the apex of Big Three comity and agreement, the issues and disagreements also evident at the conference would help disrupt the Grand Alliance and lead to the cold war.

See also foreign policy.

Further reading: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Keith Sainsbury, The Turning Point: Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and Chiang Kai-Shek, 1943: The Moscow, Cairo, and Teheran Conferences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).