• The Ring Index, by Austin M. Patterson and Leonard T. Capell, is first published.
• Bulletin Signalétique, a French abstract journal, is first published.
• Montclair (NJ) Public Library begins using punched cards in a circulation control system. Reports on this appear in library literature in 1941 (Jahoda, 1961 ; Becker, 1976 ).
• Library of Congress installs the first punched cards machines in the Card Division to help with accounting operations ( Gull, 1953 ).
• W.E. Batten develops aspect cards based on optical coincidence retrieval . (Williams, 2002 )

• First fully functional, automatic, programmable, general purpose digital computer. Dr. Konrad Zuse develops. Name: Z3.
• Commercial television broadcasting begins in the US with the FCC issuing first commercial license ( Emard, 1976 ).
• Army Medical Library Friends group begins publication of Current List of Medical Literature, to assist users of the Medicofilm Service (Schullian, 1958 ).

• First functioning prototype electronic digital computer in the US. Name: Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC computer).
• Ralph Shaw patents the Rapid Selector.
• USDA Library begins publication of the Bibliography of Agriculture (Emard, 1976 ).
• National Registry of Rare Chemicals established by the Armour Research Foundation in Chicago.

• The Army Medical Library begins a free microfilm service of copies of materials. Free to federal agencies and other institutions.
• First programmable, electronic digital code-breaking computer is developed during Allied wartime efforts at Bletchley Park, England. Name: Colossus .
• Howard Aiken demonstrates MARK I, the first operational program-controlled computer in the US (Emard, 1976 ).
• Technical Library Techniques Symposium is held at an ACS meeting, and the Chemical Literature Group is formed as part of the Division of Chemical Education.
• John F. Langan, Chief of the Pictorial Records Division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) designs and implements the microfilm aperture card.  He received a patent for the invention in 1950 but sold the rights to Atherton Richards and W.J. Casey who incorporated the Film N' File Corporation, later Filmsort, Inc. ( Cady, 1999 )
• National Microfilm Association (NMA) is formed Jesse H. Shera said that the microfilm adherents in ADI were losing influence so they formed NMA ( Shera & Cleveland, 1972 ).

• Howard Aiken and others develop the first large-scale, automatic, electromechanical computer. Name: Harvard Mark I (aka IBM ASCC).
• Fremont Rider proposes that the text of books be put on the back of library catalog cards in microformat, calling them "microcards" ( Gull, 1953 ; Buckland, 1996 ).

• Bush authors Science, the Endless Frontier: Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research. Bush is Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) at the time ( Pinelli, Henderson, Bishop, & Doty, 1992 ).
• Article by Gerald J. Cox, Charles F. Baily, and Robert S. Casey in Chemical and Engineering News, "Punched Cards for a Chemical Bibliography," is first to bring punched cards to attention of chemists ( Skolnik, "Milestones," 1976 ).
• United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Unesco) is founded.
• June: Publication Board is established (to succeed OSRD) in the Department of Defense (DoD) for handling of US scientific and technical reports. Responsibilities include declassification of classified reports and dissemination of all reports. Later is established as part of the Department of Commerce as the Office of Technical Services (OTS). This agency is the precursor of the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) (Brownson, 1953 ).
• July: Bush article "As We May Think" appears in Atlantic Monthly. Buckland (1996 ) said the article was actually written in the late 1930’s, when Bush was actively working on his Microfilm Rapid Selector).

• John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert develop the first large scale, general purpose, electronic digital computer. Name: ENIAC . This machine is a "peculiar hybrid of punched card machine and electronic circuitry" Sponsored in part by the US Army Research Lab (Norberg, 1990 ).
• John von Neuman, Arthur Burks, and Herman Goldstine publish a preliminary description of the logical design of an electronic computer (Emard, 1976 ).
• ADI publishes the first edition of the Catalog of Auxiliary Publications in Microfilms and Photoprints (Redmond, 1985 ). Lists approximately 2,000 documents as well as microfilmed sets of journals deposited with ADI.
• USDA Library offers to furnish copies of all articles cited in CA to subscribers and members of the ACS. Project is halted in 1956 because of copyright issues (Adkinson, 1976 ).
• Royal Society (London) Empire Scientific Conference, Cambridge, holds conference and discusses need for improved scientific information systems. Recommends that a special Royal Society conference on this issue be held at a later date. This special conference is held in 1948 (see below for details).
• ACS board establishes a Board Committee on Punched Cards, with James W. Perry as chairman. The committee's activities are financially supported by the ACS with additional funds solicited from industry. Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Scientific Aids to Learning continues this work with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation (New tools, 1954 ).
• The Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker is founded, replacing the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft and the Verein Deutscher Chemiker.
• G. Malcolm Dyson presents a paper before London's Royal Institute of Chemistry on his notation system, which seeks to represent chemical structures uniquely and unambiguously in a linear sequence of letters and numbers. IUPAC provisionally recommends the Dyson system ( Skolnik, "Milestones," 1976 ; Weisgerber, 1997 ).
• The Publications Board (PB) of the US government begins publication of Bibliography of Scientific and Technical Reports ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• Chemical Biological Coordination Center (CBCC) is established in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (NRC). Begins a punched-card system to organize complex information files (Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• Federal medical science agencies begin exchanging information on their research plans and programs to aid in more effective management and to avoid duplication of research. These agencies establish the Medical Sciences Information Exchange in 1950 ( Bourne & Hahn, in press ).

• Calvin Mooers establishes the Zator Company , a private firm for work in the area of information retrieval.
• William E. Batten, Imperial Chemical Industries in Great Britain, reports on the use of optical coincidence cards for information retrieval.
• John von Neuman converts the ENIAC concept of external programming to stored programming in development of the EDVAC ( Emard, 1976 ).
• Preparation of the CA fourth decennial index (covering 1937-46) requires 1.6 million index cards, five miles of one-column galley proofs, and several years to produce.
• First volume of first edition of Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology is published.
• US Department of Commerce OTS issues contract for development of a Rapid Selector, based on the ideas in Bush’s Rapid Selector, to Engineering Research Associates (ERA), St. Paul, MN. Development of the machine is to be under general supervision of Ralph Shaw , USDA Library. The machine employs photoelectric cells to scan coded information (usually in dots) on reels of microfilm at a high rate. The reels of microfilm can contain citations, abstracts, or the full text of the retrieved documents. Development of refinements to the machine, variations on it, etc. continued for the next 12 years (according to Jahoda, 1961 ). A number of different patents are issued on the Rapid Selector.
• "Steelman Report" is issued, calling for the White House to appoint a scientific liaison for scientific affairs and to review current developments in scientific information ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Technical Information Service begins. Publishes Weekly Title List . Later is named Nuclear Science Abstracts ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• September: The Library of Congress and the Office of Naval Research sponsor a three day conference on "Bibliographical Control of Government Scientific and Technical Reports." More than 40 agencies, mostly military, are represented. Recommend development of a special committee on technical information to deal with all issues discussed. This special committee is established, and later the NSF Office of Scientific Information and Armed Services Technical Information Agency (ASTIA--see 14 May 1951) takes over its functions (Brownson, 1953 ).
• November: Atomic Energy Research Establishment sets up an experimental punched card indexing system. Discontinues in November 1949 in favor of a "visual" system (Perry, et al., 1956 ).
• Mortimer Taube and Cloyd Dake Gull (both on the staff of the Library of Congress) visit Mauchley, ENIAC developer, at the University of Pennslyvania. They ask him if the ENIAC could handle the alphabet. Mauchley says yes, but with difficulty ( Gull, 1987 ).
• H. P. Luhn , IBM , develops an early prototype of the " Luhn Scanner " for use of the CIA in information retrieval.
• US Army Medical Library awards contract to Welch Medical Library of Johns Hopkins University to study the problems of medical bibliography, with the emphasis on application of machine methods. Sanford Larkey heads the project. The report recommends continuing work in the area, which eventually leads to the MEDLARS system. Project also studies the merits of medical subject headings and is an early step in the development of the MeSH (medical subject headings) language. Participants in the project are (at various times): Larkey (Director), Robert Hayne, Seymour Taine   Thelma Sharon, Helen G. Field, Willamina Himwich, John Whittock, and Eugene Garfield (began working in 1951).
• Jacques Samain (France) develops information retrieval system using Hollerith/IBM punched cards sorted by electrical circuits. (US patent is received in 1952 on a modification of the system using photo-electric cells.) Jahoda (1961 ) said that the development was not pursued and that Samain later developed the Filmorex system based on the Rapid Selector by Shaw .

• Welch Medical Library Indexing Project at Johns Hopkins University begins. Sponsored by the Army Medical Library (now the National Library of Medicine (NLM)), it is one of the first efforts to study medical and chemical nomenclature and indexing and to apply machine technologies to this information.
• Various individuals at Manchester University, England develop the first prototype, electronic stored program computer. Name: Manchester Mark I .
• The Haloid Company and Battelle Labs announce the development of xerography.
• The School of Library Science, Western Reserve University (WRU) offers the first courses on documentation in the US. Helen Focke teaches the courses (Shera & Cleveland, 1972 ).
• DoD study recommends that the Army Medical Library become the joint armed forces medical library.
• Calvin Mooers develops the concept of Zatocoding, using "descriptors" and random coding on mechanically sorted edge-notched cards (Mooers, 1976 ).
• Royal Society Scientific Information Conference convenes in London (Emard, 1976 ).
• ACS's Division of Chemical Literature is formed and the next year begins publication of Chemical Literature . In 1975 name changes to Division of Chemical Information.
• Gmelin-Institut für Anorganische Chemie und Grenzgebiete of the Max-Planck Institut commences editing and publishing Gmelin Handbuch .
• James W. Perry and G. Malcolm Dyson discuss with Thomas J. Watson, IBM President, the need to develop a machine to handle large volumes of scientific information, particularly chemical information. Watson agrees to work on the problem and assigns Hans Peter Luhn to the project (Mechanized, 1952 ).
• Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics.

• George Willard Wheland, professor at the University of Chicago, develops basic concept of the connection table to represent chemical structures.
• William J. Wiswesser introduces Wiswesser Line Notation.
• First large scale, fully functional, stored program electronic digital computer begins operation as a regular computing service; developed at Cambridge University, England. Name: EDSAC .
• The first xerographic copier , Model A, was introduced.
• At Sharp and Dohme, Claire Schultz employs Calvin Mooers' superimposed coding using the Zator system (edge-notched cards).  In early 1950 she begins using the Remington Rand punched-card sorter to perform chemistry searches. In 1951 she begins using the IBM 101 (machine sorted cards) to perform Boolean searches.
• Science Information Exchange begins operation with six government agencies cooperating (Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• Austin M. Patterson receives first A. M. Patterson Award for Documentation in Chemistry from ACS's Dayton Section. In 1975 the award is expanded to honor E. J. Crane and becomes the Patterson-Crane Award.
• J. Forrester and others at MIT develop the first real-time processing computer. Name: Whirlwind I .
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