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Lawrence Joseph Giacoletto, in the United States, develops an effective high-frequency small-signal model of transistors, also known as the Giacoletto-Johnson model.

Uprising in Tibet against Chinese occupation

Golda Meir Israeli Prime Minister

Buzz Aldrin flies the KC-135 (also known as the Vomit Comet) 79 times in a single day, a new record. Everyone vomits, except Buzz.

In January 1969, the Lunokhod program, designed by the Lavochkin Laboratory under the leadership of Oleg Ivanovsky, was approved. Its original purpose was to pave the way for a manned landing. The same Lavochkin bureau also designed the Lunar Sample Return program. A first attempt

The Muchison meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite (i.e., non-ferrous and carbon-rich), fell in Australia; analysis of its interior revealed 74 amino acids, eight of which (out of 20) are also present on Earth, all five nitrogenous bases that make up DNA, and numerous alien amino acids,

Apollo 8: First night of the Apollo 8 mission. Frank Borman can’t sleep. After two hours of coughing, he takes a sleeping pill. Two hours later, he wakes up having convulsions with diarrhea and vomiting. It’s space sickness (and therefore not contagious), but the doctors

Apollo 8 (Saturn V SA-503): Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders make the first manned flight around the Moon; for the first time, man leaves Earth’s orbit; they complete 10 orbits around the Moon for a total of 20 hours and 7 minutes in

It was the true climax of the Moon race. The Soviets could have beaten the Americans to the manned flight around the Moon. Their launch window opened on December 7, 1968. But the failure of Zond 6 thwarted this possibility. Even the Proton was not

The Soviet Union sends Zond 5 into lunar orbit.

Neil Armstrong manages to eject from the LM prototype at the last moment (half a second before the crash) during a test on Earth

Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn manages to smuggle the microfilm of the book The Gulag Archipelago to the West. Shortly thereafter, he also meets the physicist Andrei Sakharov and Natalya Svetlova, a young mathematician who will become his second wife. Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945, sentenced

Paris. Tens of thousands of students, including those from the Sorbonne, clash with police in the streets of the capital. A general strike brings the country to a standstill. Similar scenes will soon be repeated in Berkeley, California, Harvard, Boston, and the Free University of

Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. He’s only 39 years old. The killer is a racist white man, his age. He strikes the pastor as he looks out onto the terrace of the Lorraine Hotel. He shoots him with a Remington rifle.

Student movement in major Western countries

The hard rock band Led Zeppelin is formed: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham: in an era dominated by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones they burst into existence with a new genre, hard rock.

American physiologist David Nalin, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, invents Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT), which helps fight cholera. It will save 54 million lives (estimate updated at the beginning of the 21st century).

Saigon, Vietnam. American photographer Eddie Adams took the famous photo “Saigon Execution,” for which he would win the Pulitzer Prize. Years later, the journalist discovered that a Viet Cong raid had just taken place, killing dozens of civilians, including all six children and the wife

The automatic probe Surveyor 5 lands in the Sea of Tranquility, two years before Apollo 11. It sends back to Earth analyses of the soil, which is identified as basalt but with high concentrations of iron and titanium.

The Maltese ambassador to the UN denounces the possibility that the Soviets and Americans might lay nuclear mines on the seabed. He calls for the ocean depths to be declared a common good of humanity. The UN will endorse the proposal in 1970.

Coup by George Padadopoulos in Greece: Dictatorship of the Colonels

Marshall Niremberg discovers that the basic building blocks of the Escherichia coli genetic code are the same as those of frogs and guinea pigs: a universal code that confirms the common origin of all living things, already predicted a century earlier by Charles Darwin. For

NASA test pilot Bruce A. Peterson is the victim of a spectacular, but non-fatal, accident at Edwards Air Force Base in California, with his M2-F2 Lifting Body; footage of the accident becomes the opening scene of the television series “The Six Million Dollar Man.”

Douglas Aircraft Corp. and McDonnell Corp. merge to form McDonnell Douglas Corp., headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri.

After the tragic Apollo 1 accident, Betty Grissom, Gus’s wife, tired of being ignored by the government, sued North American, winning the case and receiving $350,000 in damages and $300,000 to be split between Mrs. White and Mrs. Chaffee. Pat White committed suicide in 1983,

Scottish chemist Graham Cairns-Smith coined the theory called Inorganic Mineral according to which DNA is nothing but the last link in a chain of cruder replicators whose first links would be made up of mineral replicators that would have acted perhaps in the first billion

Surveyor 2 experiences navigation system problems and is lost in space

United States. University campuses erupt in protest against the Vietnam War. Not since the American Civil War, a century earlier, had there been such public civil dissent against a war effort.

Gemini 9: Launch of the Atlas-Agena target for Gemini; the target disintegrates due to an attitude control error; mission aborted

Indonesia. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese are massacred.

Cultural Revolution in China. 600,000 dead.

Gemini V: Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad remain in orbit for eight days and set the first American record over the Soviets; first in-orbit fuel cell test

Seven Minueman IIs are built every week, each with 2,000 Texas Instruments integrated circuits. The US Navy also begins purchasing integrated circuits for its Polaris missiles. Then RCA and Westinghouse arrive, and finally the price drops to the point of becoming affordable for the general

Frank Herbert publishes “Dune”

Two Marine battalions land to defend Danang Air Base in Vietnam, marking the first U.S. combat troops in Vietnam.

Tetra Pak introduces the TetraRex gable-top format

Montevideo, Uruguay. Herbert Cukurs, “the Butcher of Riga,” is assassinated by the Israeli Mossad. He was accused of killing over 30,000 men, women, and children. He was the leader of the Latvian Arajs Kommando, which collaborated with the Nazis. The Latvian Nazi Legion was among

Roger Penrose states his first, revolutionary, Singularity Theorem. It states that a Singularity occurs inside a black hole if a massive dead star contracts under its own gravity. Roger Penrose was inspired to study the topic by Dennis Sciama, a friend of his brother Oliver.

American astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Russian cosmologists Yaakov Zeldovich and Andrei Doroskevic find new solutions to Einstein’s equations describing anisotropic universes containing ordinary matter, radiation, and the cosmic magnetic field.

China conducts first of 47 nuclear tests at Lop Nur range; 22kton bomb

A Soviet Vostok spacecraft carrying cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov reached an apogee of 336 km during its suborbital flight. This was the first three-passenger mission, while the American Gemini, carrying two astronauts, had yet to make its second flight.

Following Giuseppe Saragat’s statements that money was being squandered in the Italian nuclear industry, an investigation was launched into Felice Ippolito, who was accused of 40 crimes and sentenced to 11 years in prison in October 1963. He was released in 1968, pardoned by Giuseppe

Khrushchev, accepting his dismissal from power, offers no resistance. In a telephone call to a friend and colleague that same evening, he says: “Could we have even dreamed of telling Stalin that his policies were the wrong ones, and suggesting that he retire? Not even

The two-piece-can process is invented, allowing beverage cans to be made more economically.

Molise separates from Abruzzo and becomes the twentieth Italian region

Philips introduces the first cassette for music recording

Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy announced on national television that military spy planes had discovered the existence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba. The president ordered a naval blockade of the island and demanded the removal of the missiles. Over the next six

Cuba. Further US air strikes reveal a cluster of sites with SS-5 IRBM missiles, with 5.5 megaton warheads and ranges of 2,200 km.

U-2 spy planes photograph Soviet ICBM installations on Cuban soil; 32 sites confirmed three days later

For four years, the Americans undisturbedly spied on the Soviet Union using U-2 spy planes, which photographed the territory from a height (21 km) beyond the reach of Soviet fighters or missiles. Thousands of missions were flown over Soviet territory. 138 pilots died during the

American agent Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky is arrested by the Soviets. He will be executed the following year.

All integrated circuits produced in the United States are purchased by the Department of Defense, primarily for installation in the guidance system of ICBM missiles.

Wally Schirra completes six orbits aboard his Sigma 7 spacecraft launched by a Mercury-Atlas; first splashdown in the Pacific Ocean

The USSR detonates a 19.1 Mton nuclear device dropped from an aircraft

The Pregnant Guppy, a used Boeing B377 Stratocruiser purchased by John M. Conroy and modified to house the third stage of the Saturn V, takes off from Huntsville, Alabama, for a demonstration flight; the enthusiasm for the successful flight of such a strange and clumsy

Mariner 2 flyby Venus

classic example of a bottom-up strategy, in which a humble but determined NASA engineer pitches his idea to the government agency’s management. Without his idea, the first moon landing in the 1960s most likely would never have taken place… his famous exclamation was: “Do we

Johnston Island, Operation FishBowl; “StarFish Prime” rocket detonation at 400 km altitude, 1.4 Mt; produced an artificial aurora that lasted 7 minutes and caused electrical failure on Oahu, Hawaii, 1,290 km away; the developed W-49 warhead was mounted on Thor, Atlas, Jupiter, and Titan missiles.

Kennedy formally announces a new series of atmospheric nuclear tests: in 1962 alone, 96 atmospheric tests will be carried out.

The American Mohole program (named after the Croatian scientist Andrija Mohorovicic, who discovered the existence of the boundary between the crust and the mantle at about 35 km below Europe) was developed, without success, which, through deep drilling, searches for the beginning of the mantle

The Strategic Air Command (SAC) launches the design of a new ground-based missile, the Minuteman II, which will require 2,000 integrated circuits for its guidance system alone. Texas Instruments wins the contract. In 1965, seven Minuteman IIs will be built every week, year-round, and the

NASA awards Boeing the contract to build the Saturn V’s F1 engines.

Khrushchev tells Kennedy that the USSR has 100 million ton weapons.

Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently theorize the existence of up, down, and strange quarks

The Americans send another monkey into space with a Mercury-Redstone; his name is Enos.

James E. Webb is named NASA administrator

The President’ Scientific Advisory Committee for the Moon landing draws up a document where it says: “at present the most compelling reason for our effort has been the international political situation which demands that we demonstrate out technological capabilities if we are to maintain our

At Santa Susana, near Los Angeles, Rocketdyne conducts the first hot-firing test of the J-2 liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen engine used for the Saturn IB and Saturn V (second stage)

Baikonur, USSR. The first test of the R-16 rocket is underway. A test so important that even Korolyev’s boss, Mitrofan Nedelin, head of the Strategic Forces, is present. 6:45 a.m.: A problem is noticed, the countdown is stopped, and hundreds of engineers approach the rocket

NORAD, Colorado Springs. The Thule radar went online last week. While top executives from Bell & Howell and IBM were visiting, the alert level was progressively increased from 1 to 5, which means 99.9% certainty that the United States was under Soviet nuclear attack. The

The SA-2 rocket that shot down Gary Powers’ U-2 was designed by Chelomei’s group, Korolyov’s arch-rival.

Adriano Olivetti dies of illness while traveling by train to Switzerland, at the age of just 58. With the death of Adriano Olivetti, and then of Mario Tchou the following year, a brilliant era of Italian electronics comes to an end. Olivetti was a different

USSR. Yevpatoria, Crimea. In 1960, a gigantic communications center for lunar and interplanetary probes was built. It consisted of systems such as Pluton (eight 16-meter dishes). In 1978, it was replaced by RT-70, also in Yevpatoria. It would be the most powerful interplanetary communications station

The first integrated circuit reaches the market: it costs $120. NASA chooses Noyce’s invention for its on-board computers on the Gemini.

Most scientists still believe in a steady state of the Universe; the main exponents of this current are Fred Hoyle and two German refugees: Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold.

Cold War. Most Europeans believed in Soviet military superiority over the Americans, especially in missile technology. The reality was the opposite, but even the Americans would only discover this with the Corona spy satellites, from 1960 onwards.

Central America. The civil war in Guatemala claims 200,000 lives.

Somalia (formerly Italian and British rule) becomes an independent state; Siad Barre is a deputy commander of the Somali army; later, after a period of training with Soviet officers, he becomes a supporter and advocate of Marxism

Clementina Perone returns to Italy after 10 years of forced labor in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. She discovers that her husband, Giovanni Parodi, also returned from Russia, having believed her dead and remarried. Clementina Perone is a symbol of the Turin factory occupation, having fled to Russia

American President Eisenhower (hero of the war against the Nazis) inaugurates the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama (Marshall was another hero of the war in Europe) and appoints Wernher von Braun (who designed the V1 and V2 for the Nazis) as director.