1946
ENIAC unveiled at Penn
A thirty-ton tangle of vacuum tubes, capacitors, and plugboards filling a Philadelphia basement room became the first general-purpose electronic computer. ENIAC could do five thousand additions a second and broke down frequently. A small female team known as the ENIAC girls programmed it by rewiring. The digital age had turned on its first switch.
Nuremberg trials deliver verdicts
In a Bavarian courthouse, surviving Nazi leaders were tried for crimes against humanity and war crimes in the first international tribunal of its kind. Hermann Goering cheated the hangman with a smuggled cyanide capsule. Ten others went to the gallows. A new body of law, fragile but real, had been written in response to industrial-scale murder.
Japan adopts postwar constitution
Under American occupation, Japan adopted a new constitution drafted largely by MacArthur's staff, including a young woman named Beate Sirota Gordon who wrote the equal rights provisions. It stripped the emperor of divinity, guaranteed rights to women, and in Article 9 renounced war forever as a sovereign right. The constitution still stands, unamended, almost eighty years later. A new Japan had been written.
Philippine independence
The United States granted independence to the Philippines, forty-eight years after taking the islands from Spain. The Fourth of July was chosen as Independence Day as a sort of American farewell. The Philippines became a sovereign republic, though the continuing American military presence and economic ties would shape its politics for decades.
Iron Curtain speech
At Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill, no longer prime minister, told his audience that from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain had descended across the continent. The phrase caught. A new geopolitical reality had its name. The wartime alliance with Stalin was publicly finished.
Vietnam War against France begins
After the French tried to reclaim Indochina at the end of World War II, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh rose against them. The First Indochina War would last eight years and end at Dien Bien Phu. The second Indochina War would draw in the Americans. Thirty years of war over a narrow strip of Southeast Asia had begun.
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Frequently asked
What happened in the year 1946?
Saeculum lists 6 curated events from 1946. The most significant is ENIAC unveiled at Penn: A thirty-ton tangle of vacuum tubes, capacitors, and plugboards filling a Philadelphia basement room became the first general-purpose electronic computer.
What era was 1946 part of?
1946 falls within the Modern Era (1901-2000). World wars, cold war, and the splitting of the atom.
Which regions saw notable events in 1946?
The curated events from 1946 span North America, Europe, East Asia and Southeast Asia.