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Top Song(s)
• Percy Faith - Delicado
• Kay Starr - Wheel of Fortune
• Leroy Anderson - Blue Tango
• Jimmy Boyd - I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
• Patti Page - I Went to Your Wedding
Top Film(s)
• Ikiru
• High Noon
• Singin' in the Rain
• Umberto D.
• The Quiet Man
Best Selling Book(s)
• Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
• The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - C.S. Lewis
• The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
• East of Eden - John Steinbeck
• They Do It With Mirrors - Agatha Christie
Famous Deaths
• January 18 – Curly Howard, American actor and comedian
• February 17 – Edvige Carboni, Italian Roman Catholic laywoman, mystic and venerable
• March 5 – Sir Charles Sherrington, British physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate
• April 5 – Charles Collett, British chief mechanical engineer (Great Western Railway)
• June 14 – Felix Calonder, Swiss politician, 36th President of the Swiss Confederation
• August 29 – Euphrasia Eluvathingal, Indian Carmelite nun and saint
• September 22 – Kaarlo Juho Stahlberg, Finnish jurist and academic, 1st President of Finland
• October 22 – Ernst Rüdin, Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist, and eugenicist
• November 26 – Sven Hedin, Swedish explorer, geographer and geopolitician
• December 8 – Charles Lightoller, British merchant marine officer, second officer of RMS Titanic
Medical/Science/Technology
• The Braeburn apple cultivar is discovered as a chance seedling in New Zealand.
• Last confirmed sighting of the Caribbean monk seal, at Serranilla Bank, between Jamaica and Nicaragua.
• The first autocode and its compiler are developed by Alick Glennie for the Manchester Mark 1 computer.
• Soviet scientists L. V. Radushkevich and V. M. Lukyanovich publish images of carbon nanotubes.
• The Bradley–Terry model in probability theory is presented.
• A mechanical heart is used for the first time in a human patient, in the United States.
• American orthopedic surgeon Armin Klein publishes Klein's line as a diagnostic tool.
• The first successful surgical separation of conjoined twins is conducted in Mount Sinai Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio.
• Robert Gwyn Macfarlane and colleagues publish the first identification of Haemophilia B.
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Political
• March 20 - The United States Senate ratifies a peace treaty with Japan.
• March 29 – U.S. President Harry S. Truman announces that he will not seek reelection.
• April 8 – The U.S. Supreme Court limits the power of the president to seize private business.
• April 28 – The Treaty of San Francisco goes into effect, formally ending the occupation of Japan.
• June 19 – The United States Army Special Forces is created.
• July 25 – Puerto Rico becomes a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.
• September 19 – The United States bars Charlie Chaplin from re-entering the country, after a trip to the UK.
• September 23 – Republican vice presidential candidate Richard Nixon gives his Checkers speech.
• October 14 – The United Nations begins work in the new headquarters of the United Nations in New York City.
• November 4 - Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower defeats Democratic Governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson.
National
• January 14 – The Today Show premieres on NBC, becoming one of the longest-running television series in America.
• February 20 – Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American umpire in organized baseball.
• March 21 – Tornadoes ravage the lower Mississippi River Valley, leaving 208 dead, through March 22.
• April 15 – The United States B-52 Stratofortress flies for the first time.
• April 23 – A nuclear test is held in the Nevada desert.
• April 29 – Lever House officially opens in New York City, heralding a new age of commercial architecture in the United States.
• May 3 – U.S. lieutenant colonels Joseph O. Fletcher and William P. Benedict land a plane at the geographic North Pole.
• July 19–26 – Washington D.C. UFO incident. Several alleged UFOs tracked on multiple radars.
• November 4 - The U.S. National Security Agency is founded.
• November 20 – The first official passenger flight over the North Pole is made from Los Angeles to Copenhagen.
Worldwide
• February 14–25 – The Winter Olympics are held in Oslo, Norway.
• February 26 – Vincent Massey is sworn in, becoming the first Canadian-born Governor General of Canada.
• April 4 - In the Hague Tribunal, Israel demands reparations worth $3 billion from Germany.
• May 1 – East Germany threatens to form its own army.
• May 13 – Pandit Nehru forms his first government in India.
• June 15 – Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is published in English-language translation.
• August 12 – Night of the Murdered Poets: 13 Soviet Jewish poets are executed.
• August 16 – Lynmouth, North Devon, England is devastated by floods; 34 die.
• August 18 – A 7.5 earthquake shakes the Tibet region leaving a balance of 54 fatalities.
• September 30 – The Revised Standard Version of the Bible is published.