10 engineering breakthroughs of the 1950s we still rely on

By Kitson Workshop · 3 October 2026 · 10 minute read

Between 1950 and 1960, engineers made cars safer, let doctors see inside the body and keep a heart beating, pulled power from sunlight and drinking water from salt, sent pictures through bent glass and made laser light. Here are ten of those stories in brief. Credit in engineering is rarely one person's, so each one says who the sources credit and where they disagree.

1. The three-point seat belt (1959)

Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin, hired by Volvo as a safety engineer in 1958, perfected a three-point belt that Volvo introduced in 1959. He didn't invent the seat belt; his patent's key move was to fix the belt to the car's body and floor instead of the seat, and to make it buckle with one hand. Volvo let every carmaker use the design free of charge. Full story · video · book

2. Medical ultrasound (1956-1958)

Tom Brown, born in Glasgow in 1933, joined the instrument firm Kelvin and Hughes as an apprentice in 1951 and worked on ultrasound for testing welds. In 1956 he heard that Professor Ian Donald was trying a metal flaw detector on patients and phoned him. Brown became convinced the machine needed to draw a picture; by early 1957 his prototype, built from a disused flaw detector, Meccano and a hospital bed table, was ready. In June 1958 Donald, John MacVicar and Brown published their results in The Lancet. Video · book

3. The implantable pacemaker (1950-1960)

There is no single inventor; it was a relay. In 1950 Hopps, Callaghan and Bigelow developed an early pacemaker that sat outside the body and plugged into the wall. In 1957 Earl Bakken built a wearable battery-powered one for surgeon Walton Lillehei. In October 1958 in Stockholm, surgeon Ake Senning implanted a pacemaker designed by Rune Elmqvist of Elema in Arne Larsson. In June 1960, Buffalo surgeon William Chardack implanted the design he had begun with engineer Wilson Greatbatch in a 77-year-old patient. Video · book

4. The silicon solar cell (1954)

At Bell Labs in New Jersey, Daryl Chapin began looking at solar power in 1953 because batteries for remote telephone equipment kept failing. A selenium cell turned only about half of one percent of sunlight into electricity; a silicon cell from physicist Gerald Pearson managed 2.3%, and chemist Calvin Fuller's improved cells reached nearly 6%. On 25 April 1954 Bell Labs showed the cells running a toy Ferris wheel on sunlight. It wasn't the first solar cell; the IEEE history wiki calls it the first practical one. Video · book

5. Practical reverse osmosis (1959-1960)

Engineers knew water could be pushed through a film to leave salt behind, but it came through far too slowly. At UCLA, research scientist Srinivasa Sourirajan and graduate student Sidney Loeb first demonstrated their membrane in 1959, and in August 1960 UCLA announced what it called the first practical membranes for reverse osmosis. In 1965 a plant in Coalinga, California turned salty well water into drinking water. Video · book

6. The heart-lung machine (1953)

Around 1930, young Boston doctor John Gibbon had the idea of taking blood out of the body, adding oxygen and sending it back. He and his wife Mary Gibbon built the early machines together; after 1946 at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, IBM engineers helped build bigger ones. On 6 May 1953 an 18-year-old student, Cecelia Bavolek, had a hole in her heart closed while the machine did the work of her heart and lungs. Jefferson itself stresses that the machine was the work of many. Video · book

7. Fibre optics for images (1954)

At Imperial College London, optics pioneer Harold Hopkins hired Narinder Singh Kapany to work on bundles of glass fibres for an endoscope. On 2 January 1954 they published in Nature a flexible bundle that carried a picture, which they called a fibrescope; in the same issue, Dutch scientist Abraham van Heel published his own work on fibre bundles. "Father of fibre optics" is a contested title, and communication fibre came later, in the mid-1960s and 1970s. Video · book

8. Measuring fast air (1950s)

Mary W. Jackson joined the Langley laboratory of NACA, the agency before NASA, in 1951 as a human computer in the segregated West Area Computing section. Engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki offered her work in a supersonic wind tunnel and suggested she train as an engineer; she needed special permission to attend the after-work classes at a segregated school. In 1958, NASA says, she became its first Black woman engineer. Her research measured where fast air over a surface turns rough. Video · book

9. The laser (1960)

Credit is shared: Townes and Schawlow proposed the idea, Gordon Gould coined the word "laser", and the 1964 Nobel Prize went to Townes, Basov and Prokhorov. But on 16 May 1960, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, Theodore Maiman, working with Irnee D'Haenens and Charles Asawa, made a synthetic ruby crystal produce laser light. Nature published his short letter on 6 August 1960. Video · book

10. The hovercraft (1955-1959)

Engineer Christopher Cockerell noticed how much power motorboats waste pushing through water. His key test, the Science Museum says, used two coffee tins of slightly different sizes, one inside the other, with air forced through the ring-shaped gap. He filed a patent in December 1955. The full-size SR-N1 made its first public flight at East Cowes on 11 June 1959 and crossed the English Channel from Calais to Dover on 25 July 1959. The Science Museum Group notes earlier air-cushion attempts elsewhere, so "first hovercraft" needs care. Video · book

What they have in common

• Cheap tests came first: coffee tins, Meccano, a toy Ferris wheel.
• Most were team efforts, even when one name gets the headline.
• "First" is slippery. The honest word is often "first practical".

Every fact here comes from the sources listed in each episode's description, checked on 3 October 2026. For educational purposes only: not engineering, medical or safety advice. The organisations named have not made, sponsored or endorsed this article.