The Mississippi River reaches its peak level in St. Louis during a record 77-day flood. During the flooding 33 died and and millions of acres of farm land were unusable for a full year following the flood, also because the area's affected were in a known flood plain many residents had no insurance and lost everything they had worked for, this is also why the 33 died as they refused to evacuate the area.

The first commercially built U.S. computer The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) is sold to the United States Census Bureau costing about US $159,000. This computer was built by Remington Rand and had been designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC ( 1947 )( the first general-purpose electronic computer ) known as the "Giant Brain". These computers did not use Transistors or micro chips but vacuum tubes ( Similar to what you find in old TV's from the fifties ) and were the size of a small house ( 680 Sq ft.