Georgetown-IBM experiment
A public demonstration translated more than sixty Russian sentences into English on an IBM 701, using six rules and a 250-item vocabulary.
Why it matters
The first public evidence that translation could be automated set expectations the field could not meet for twelve years.
The sentences were chosen in advance and the vocabulary and rules covered exactly those. The press described the result as a nearly solved problem and funding for machine translation grew. The gap between the demonstration and the general case became the subject of the 1966 ALPAC report.