This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

and we tell stories about everything here on this show,

including your stories, send them to OurAmerican Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show, including your

stories, send them to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites. And up next,

well, a great history story. In 1927, the Iron Lung was invented. This machine helped keep people

alive who were stricken with polio, a disease which today is mostly eradicated.

But in the late 1940s, disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year.

Here's our own Monty Montgomery with the story of this life-saving device.

In the first half of the 20th century,

there was nothing quite like polio.

Here's Darren Glassburg of the Mobile Medical Museum,

with more on that.

You know, polio was a really serious virus

that affected mainly young children,

children between the ages of five and nine, through the mid-1950s.

The peak year was 1952, and there were 58,000 reported cases.

This is polio, the cruel centuries-old crippler of children.

Enlarge 77,000 times These are actual polioviruses.

To the University of Michigan campus in 1955 came hundreds of scientists hoping to hear the

words that would signal the end of polio's long and ruthless reign of terror.

...