Ronald McDonald House

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2014

Walter Golaski, a Polish-American engineer and Drexel graduate, began his career designing machinery for the knitting industry and earned numerous patents. In the 1960s he applied that expertise to medicine, perfecting the Dense Knit Dacron Vascular Prosthesis, the first practical artificial blood vessel. His workshop stood here for many years, and he worked to foster cultural exchange between Poland and the United States.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Inside this Philadelphia building—one of the first constructed specifically for television—a local dance show called "Bandstand" went on the air in 1952. When Dick Clark took over as host in 1956 and the program debuted nationally as "American Bandstand" on ABC in 1957, it became a cultural phenomenon, beaming the latest music and dance steps to teenagers across the country. Broadcast from WFIL-TV here until 1964, it helped define the sound and style of a generation.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

In 1946, in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly unveiled ENIAC — a room-filling machine of some 18,000 vacuum tubes originally built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army. Programmed by rewiring and setting switches, it could perform thousands of operations per second, dwarfing every mechanical calculator that came before. From this first general-purpose electronic digital computer descended the machines that now sit on every desk and in every pocket.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2002

Established in 1855, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was the first hospital in the nation devoted entirely to the care of children. Over the decades it became a proving ground for pediatric medicine, developing lifesaving vaccines, pioneering newborn surgical techniques, and advancing treatment for childhood cancer. Its founding reflected a growing 19th-century conviction that children's health deserved dedicated, specialized care.