This is an IHeart podcast.

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.com.

They're some of our favorites.

And up next, well, a great history story.

And all of our history stories are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale

College. 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, when there were 58,000 reported cases.

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

Enlarge 77,000 times.

These are actual polio viruses.

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.

Fortunately, the vaccine was developed in 1955.

But before Jonas Salk discovered that vaccine,

the only way to mitigate the effects of advanced polio

...