President:
Pres: Franklin D. Roosevelt dies
Pres: Harry S. Truman
General
- Business: Auto workers strike at General Motors
- Entertainment: Ebony magazine founded
"Carousel" debuts on Broadway
Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker begin era of bebop jazz
First television hits the market
- Medicine: Fluoride added to water supplies in the United States
- Military: Scientist Harry K Daghlian Jr. drops brick of tungsten carbide onto plutonium and dies of radiation poisoning –
- first critical radiation poisoning death
Operation Paperclip gives Nazi scientists immunity in exchange for work
- Technology: RCA orthicon tube improves TV
FCC creates 13 channel broadcasting spectrum – applications follow
East
- New York: Ball point pens go on sail at Gimbels
City Hall Station discontinued due to longer trains and a sharp turn
B-25 bomber crashes into Empire State Building in dense fog, 14 die, and New Yorkers believed their city to be under attack
NY researchers linked to Manhattan Project experiment with fluoridation
Heirs of Ruppert and Barrow sell NY Yankees to syndicate
Frank Lloyd Wright designs Guggenheim
- Pennsylvania: First electronic computer built at University of Pennsylvania
Midwest
- General: Tornado stretched from Oklahoma through Arkansas to Missouri
- Illinois: Manhattan Project doctors inject plutonium into patients in Chicago
South
- Georgia: Researchers in Atlanta infect 800 prisoners with malaria
West and Pacific
- California: San Francisco conference – UN charter signed
- New Mexico: US develops atom bomb at Los Alamos and detonated near Alamogordo
- Utah: Army private Bertucci guns down eight Germans in POW camp in Salina - buried at Fort Douglas
Sunnyside Utah mine explosion when coal dust explodes