X-Nico

unusual facts about 1940s


40s

Sometimes the '40s is used as shorthand for the 1940s, the 1840s, or other such decades in various centuries – see List of decades.


Ashleigh Brilliant

Brilliant attended Hendon School (then Hendon County School), London, in the 1940s–50s.

Augustus Fanno Farmhouse

Fanno descendants produced onions on the farm until onion maggots drove them out of business in the 1940s.

Auster Autocrat

The Auster J/1 Autocrat was a 1940s British single-engined three-seat high-wing touring monoplane built by Auster Aircraft Limited at Rearsby, Leicestershire.

Basil Radford

They appeared together in several other 1940s films, including Crook's Tour (1941), Millions Like Us (1943), Dead of Night (1945), Quartet (1948), It's Not Cricket (1949) and Passport to Pimlico (1949).

Big Town Playboys

Founded by Ricky Cool and Andy Silvester in 1984 and known as Ricky Cool and the Big Town Playboys, they covered American music from the 1940s and 1950s, such as that of Amos Milburn and Little Walter.

Catadioptric system

The idea of replacing the complicated Schmidt corrector plate with an easy to manufacture full aperture spherical meniscus lens (a meniscus corrector shell) to create a wide field telescope occurred to at least 4 optical designers in early 1940s war-torn Europe, including Albert Bouwers (1940), Dmitri Dmitrievich Maksutov (1941), K. Penning, and Dennis Gabor (1941).

Cecil King

Cecil King (rugby league Australia) (father of Johnny King), rugby league footballer of the 1940s for South Sydney Rabbitohs

Clyde Lucas

Gloria Wood, a popular singer singer from the 1940s through to the 1970s made her first recordings with the Clyde Lucas band.

Donald Douglas

Don Douglas (1905–1945) Scottish-born film actor in U.S. films of the 1920s to 1940s

Dorothy Collins

In the late 1940s, she contributed vocals to the revived Raymond Scott Quintet, a sextet that released records on the bandleader's own Master label and served as house band on the radio program Herb Shriner Time.

Dorothy Norman

During the 1930s and 1940s Norman was active in various liberal causes, particularly civil rights, education, and independence for India and for Israel.

Emeco 1006

The chair was commissioned in the 1940s by the United States Navy in World War II for use on warships: the contract specified that "it had to be able to withstand torpedo blasts to the side of a destroyer".

Emily Coleman

The diaries she kept as an American expatriate in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and in England in the 1940s through the 1960s, are valuable for chronicling her relationships with literary friends such as Djuna Barnes, who wrote much of her novel Nightwood while staying with Coleman and others at Peggy Guggenheim's country manor, Hayford Hall.

Eric Cunningham Dax

In England during the 1930s and 1940s, Dax worked with John Rawlings Rees, Francis Reitmann and other biological psychiatrists who advocated the use of somatic (physical) treatments for patients with mental problems.

Franciscan Province of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

As part of re-establishing normal church structures, the bishops worked to transfer parishes from the Franciscans to the diocesan clergy, but friars resisted, and in the 1940s, the two Franciscan provinces still held 63 of 79 parishes in the dioceses of Vrhbosna and Mostar.

Government of Australia

The growth of the ministry in the 1940s and 1950s made this increasingly impractical, and in 1956 Robert Menzies created a two-tier ministry, with only senior ministers holding Cabinet rank, also known within parliament as the front bench.

Harry Sahle

Crime novelist Mickey Spillane, who worked for Lloyd Jacquet's Funnies Inc. packager during the 1930s and 1940s, teamed with Sahle on a number of occasions, including on the character "Mike Danger", which Spillane described as "the original concept of Mike Hammer", the archetypal hardboiled detective of mid-20th century paperback novels.

Helmut Käutner

Helmut Käutner (25 March 1908, Düsseldorf – 20 April 1980, Castellina in Chianti) was a German film director active mainly in the 1940s and 1950s.

Holtville, California

The construction of railroads in the 1890s, the All-American Canal in the late 1940s, U.S. Route 80 in the 1920s later converted to Interstate 8 in the 1970s and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) economic boom in the 1990s brought more people to Holtville and the Imperial Valley.

Huckleberry Hound

Butler denied he based the voice on Carolinian actor Andy Griffith, and had been using it since the late 1940s.

Jeremiah Halpern

In the early 1940s Halpern worked with Lord Stabolgi to achieve the objectives of Bergson's Committee for a Jewish Army, a campaign which was endorsed enthusiastically by the Jewish Chronicle, but which antagonised the Zionist establishment because of its association with Jabotinsky's New Zionist Organization.

Kaiser Jeep

In 1962, Willys introduced the Jeep Wagoneer as a 1963 model to replace the 1940s-style Jeep station wagons.

Kent Taylor

Born Louis William Weiss in Nashua in northeastern Iowa, Taylor appeared in more than 110 films, the bulk of them B-movies in the 1930s and 1940s, although he also had roles in more prestigious studio releases, including I'm No Angel (1933), Cradle Song (1933), Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Payment on Demand (1951), and Track the Man Down (1955).

Kettle Moraine Scenic Drive

The idea of a route along the Kettle Moraine was believed to be conceived in the early 1940s by the Kettle Moraine Committee of the Izaak Walton League – Milwaukee Chapter, which was the backbone behind the development of the Kettle Moraine State Forest units.

L'Entrecôte

In serving steak-frites as the sole main dish, he was modelling his restaurant after the Café de Paris in Geneva, which had been serving steak-frites in this way since the early 1940s.

Laurens, South Carolina

Laurens is home to Gary Davis and Pink Anderson, acoustic blues musicians who were born in the city, as well as Redtop Davis, lightweight boxer of the 1940s and 1950s.

Lawrence Lariar

During the 1940s, Lariar began writing and published at least 16 books, including Careers in Cartooning (Dodd Mead).

Léon Gard

The 1940s, when Gard met Sacha Guitry, are marked by several portraits of the famous: Sacha Guitry, Lucien Daudet, Count Doria, Baroness Hottinguer, Georges Renand, and many others.

Lithuanians in the United Kingdom

Any Place But Home is an anthology edited by Stephan Collishaw, which collates seven personal histories written by Lithuanians who migrated to England's East Midlands in the 1940s.

Little Red Riding Rabbit

Little Red Riding Hood is depicted as a typical 1940s teen-aged girl, a "bobby soxer" with an extremely loud and grating voice (inspired by screen and radio comedienne Cass Daley, provided by Bea Benaderet).

Louis B. Boudin

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Boudin was a frequent contributor of book reviews to scholarly journals such as the Columbia Law Review, The American Journal of Sociology, and The Journal of Politics.

Militão Ribeiro

After the death of the former General Secretary of the Party, Bento Gonçalves, in the prison camp of Tarrafal, in Portuguese Cape Verde, Militão Ribeiro initiated, along with Álvaro Cunhal and Júlio Fogaça, a major reorganization of the Party, in the early 1940s.

Nat Hickey

A 5'11" guard/forward, Hickey played during the 1920s through 1940s as a member of multiple professional teams, including the Cleveland Rosenblums of the American Basketball League and the Pittsburgh Raiders, Indianapolis Kautskys, and Tri-Cities Blackhawks of the National Basketball League.

Naval Air Warfare Center Warminster

The U.S. Navy purchased the grounds to establish this facility from the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation following its bankruptcy in the 1940s.

Orange Lake, New York

In the late 1940s Mickey Spillane and a friend of his from the Army bought a woodlot on Rock Cut Road and lived in a house they built while he was writing for comic books.

Paco Betancourt

By the late 1940s and early 1950s, local music of the day—the early Tejano and conjunto music of South Texas—had become a popular genre and good business for record producers and jukebox operators.

Phil Spitalny

Phil Spitalny (November 7, 1890, Tetiev, Ukraine (territory of Russian Empire) – October 11, 1970, Miami Beach, Florida) was a musician, music critic, composer and bandleader heard often on radio during the 1930s and 1940s.

Reform Party of Ontario

The Reform Party of Ontario is not to be confused with the pre-Confederation Reform Party, which later became the Liberal Party of Ontario, or with the leftist United Reform party of the 1940s.

Royal Parker

He began his broadcasting career in the late 1940s on WASA (now WJSS), an AM radio station in Havre de Grace, Maryland, hosting a music program called the Royal Record Review.

Saint Elizabeth of the Hill Country Catholic Church

The parish had its beginnings in the 1940s for the few Catholic families and students at Appalachian State University.

Stotts City, Missouri

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Farmers Exchange Co-op provided feed grain and seed for most of western Lawrence County.

The Angelus

Secretary of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs Leon Ó Broin and Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid had discussed the original idea in the late 1940s.

The Creation of the Humanoids

Jack Pierce was Universal Pictures' master makeup artist during all of the 1930s and most of the 1940s and created the iconic Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein makeups among many others.

Trad jazz

In Britain, where boogie-woogie, "stride" piano and jump blues were popular in the 1940s, the Humphrey Lyttelton band pioneered a trad revival just after the Second World War, and Ken Colyer's Crane River band added a strong thread of New Orleans purism.

Trams in Kimberley, Northern Cape

The Kimberley tramway network formed part of the public transport system in Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa, for roughly 60 years until the late 1940s.

University Park, Illinois

Park Forest had been a model for planning in the 1940s, and Lewis Manilow, son of Nathan, formed New Community Enterprises (NCE) to build "a whole new town".

Vampire Blvd.

This cave was used in many of the film and television Westerns that were filmed in the 1940s and 1950s and was commonly used as a location for the television series Power Rangers.

Wave power

Modern scientific pursuit of wave energy was pioneered by Yoshio Masuda's experiments in the 1940s.

William M. Malone

Still in power in 1930, Finn was also the early political mentor of Arthur Samish, later the notorious liquor lobbyist whose enormous influence in the California Legislature of the 1940s led to a national political scandal.

Ysgyryd Fawr

Rudolf Hess used to walk here when he was held prisoner at nearby Maindiff Court during the early 1940s.


see also