FQ

Vietnam. The last American soldier leaves Vietnam. The game between Washington and Hanoi is officially over, according to the ceasefire schedule.

ARPANET Project. Robert Kahn, a former BBN employee, and Vincent Cerf, who wrote the first RFC (Request for Comments) for the ARPANET, developed TCP-IP: Transmission Control Protocol – Internet Protocol. Cerf was present at the first use of the ARPANET in October 1969; he is

Vietnam. North Vietnam launches an offensive against the South.

Three weeks after the astronauts left the Descartes Highlands, seismometers left on the Moon recorded the largest impact on the Moon ever recorded; the seismic waves it generated allowed the thickness of the crust at Descartes to be estimated at 15 km more than the

Wernher von Braun announces his resignation from NASA, to join Fairchild, after 27 years of government service; he spent his last years with NASA in Washington only to see his plans to continue the Saturn V launches to the Moon and then to Mars dashed.

Launch of Venera 8, which transmits from the surface of Venus for 50 minutes. The launch vehicle is a Molnyia/R-7.

NASA decides to have two Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) for the Space Shuttle: brute force to reduce system costs compared to liquid-fuel systems

The economic crisis resulted in the devaluation of the dollar, which lost its convertibility into gold. The story, of course, has more complex facets: the French, among others, aspired to undermine the dollar’s dominance on world markets; during the Vietnam War, the Americans abused their

Salyut, the first space station, enters orbit to await its crew.

South Vietnamese forces begin incursions into Laos against the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Nixon in China

The remains of 17 natural nuclear reactors have been discovered in a uranium mine in Oklo, Gabon. Nuclear waste of the same type and percentage as modern nuclear reactors is clearly present: the dreaded plutonium-239, which in its decay process generates a whole series of

7 deaths in Italy due to terrorism

Cambodia. Marshal Lon Nol organizes a coup, forcing Prince Norodom Sihanouk to resign.

The Beatles break up. The English pop quartet had changed world pop music.

Nigerian government annihilates Biafra secessionists

The last launch of a Soviet satellite from the Zenit-4 program. These spy satellites were launched over a period of seven years. This is Kosmos-355 (to confuse matters and cover up military launches, 95% of Soviet launches are designated Kosmos…). Approximately 74 Zenit-4 satellite launches

6:50 PM ET: The Apollo command module splashed down softly in the Pacific Ocean; if they hadn’t succeeded, NASA had two more crews and two Saturn Vs ready to launch by the end of the decade, to fulfill President John Fritzgerald Kennedy’s promise.

18:42 02s Italian time: The Hornet helicopters sight the orange-white parachutes of the Apollo 11 mission CM a few kilometers from the established point, 940 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu, the Hornet is only 13 miles away from the CM

Border incidents between the USSR and China on the Ussuri River: China, with 30 soldiers, occupies an uninhabited but disputed island (Chen Pao to the Chinese, Damanski to the Russians) on the Ussuri River in Manchuria, only 2 km long; the island shifted position after

“Easy Rider” starring Dennis Hopper is released in theaters.

Robert Rathbu (Bob) Wilson asks Congress for $250 million in funding for the most ambitious particle accelerator project ever attempted at the time: the future FermiLab. Wilson is asked whether the project would be of any use to national security, but Wilson responds in the

In a meeting chaired by Deke Slayton, Bob Gilruth, George Low, Chris Kraft, it was decided that Neil Armstrong would be the first to land on the Moon.

Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Hawaii. An overheated missile explodes on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, igniting the kerosene and triggering further explosions, which crack the deck in several places and spread the burning kerosene to the lower deck. Twenty-eight people die and 15

North Vietnamese envoy Thieu to the Paris Peace Conference on the Vietnam conflict declares his intention to boycott it. The negotiations collapse.

United States. President Johnson announces that all American air, sea, and artillery operations in Vietnam will cease immediately to allow for peace negotiations. Two days later, North Vietnamese envoy Thieu, at the Paris Peace Conference, declares his intention to boycott it. The negotiations collapse.

The search for the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion, which tragically disappeared on May 22, 1968, along with 99 sailors aboard, is finally bearing fruit. The US Navy turned to John Cravem, a Navy Special Projects Officer, for the search. Cravem applies Bayesian statistical techniques. He

Apollo 7: Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham test the Command Module and Service Module in Earth orbit; the launch vehicle is a Saturn IB; they complete 163 orbits and are recovered by the aircraft carrier Essex; this is likely the key to the

Taiwan. Texas Instruments reached an agreement with the island’s government to build a new semiconductor factory in Taiwan. The first integrated circuits were released in August 1969. By 1980, it had produced a billion integrated circuits, flooding the world. Meanwhile, in 1973, Singapore also became

Soviet Lev Bezymensky is allowed to publish to the world the autopsy report on Hitler’s body carried out in the Berlin bunker in 1945: for the first time the Soviets admit the Fuhrer’s suicide.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) hijacked an El Al airliner, Israel’s national airline, en route to Rome from Tel Aviv.

United States. President Johnson, contrary to Ike Eisenhower’s advice, decides that the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam should be considered only in the event of a massive and devastating Soviet intervention in the conflict.

Apollo V (SA204): Launch of an unmanned Saturn IB: the LM performs some maneuvers in orbit and then returns west of the coast of Panama. This is also the first test of the Apollo Guidance Computer and its program (named SUNBURST in this version, while

CORONA spy satellites (Mission 1101). First mission of the KH-4B (Key Hole 4B) type. Resolution improved to 2 m. The camera could also handle color film (at lower resolution and rarely used for this purpose, but useful for spotting camouflage techniques) and high-speed film. Many

DeWitt writes a study, inspired by Hugh Everett’s approach, on the Wheeler-DeWitt equation

Charles De Gaulle, beating Francois Mitterrand, is re-elected President of the French Republic

Ladislao Reti discovers and publishes Leonardo da Vinci’s original Madrid Codex. It consists of two volumes totaling 197 pages, in which, among other things, he describes perpetual motion as a chimera, describes the best alloy for reducing friction (3 parts copper, 7 parts tin, melted

First use of fuel cells in Gemini missions

Pioneer 6 is launched to study the solar wind; in December 2000, after 35 years, it is successfully contacted by NASA.

Gemini 6 and 7 rendezvous in low Earth orbit: they approach to within 25 cm of each other; for the first time it is clear that the Americans have finally overtaken the Soviets in the space race.

Gemini 76: attempted launch of Gemini VI with Schirra and Stafford on board for rendezvous with Gemini VII already in orbit, but a few seconds before launch there is a launch-kill due to the umbilical cable that has detached prematurely

On the USS Ticonderoga, a group of sailors are pushing an A4-E Skyhawk aircraft onto the deck, 70 miles from Japan. When they’re finished pushing, they whistle to signal the pilot, aboard the plane, to apply the brakes. The pilot doesn’t hear; others yell “Brakes!

A coup brings General Mobutu to power in Congo

De Gaulle re-elected president of France

Gemini 2: First Gemini mission requiring ground control

At NASA, despite the advent of computers, there is a saying: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose, computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”

A second Soviet R-7 rocket is launched in the RD-108 configuration (in place of the less powerful RD-109 engine). It carries into orbit a Vostok modified to be a military spy satellite called Zenit-4.

The USSR launches three nuclear ICBMs to test their anti-missile capabilities.

The USSR detonates a 20.9 Mton nuclear device dropped from an aircraft

Nevada Range; Operation SunBeam, “Little Feller I” rocket detonation at 27m altitude, only 18 tons of TNT (0.018Kton) to test the Davy Crockett nuclear rocket launcher

Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne’eman predict the existence of the “omega minus” hadron as the completion of a multiplet

Stan Lee (written) and Steve Ditko (artist) created the character of Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, an unconventional and bizarre hero, in step with the times. Published by Marvel Comics, his first appearance was in Amazing Fantasy (first series) #15.

The Republic of Algeria is proclaimed

16km south of Christmas Island, Operation Dominic; “Truckee” detonation at 2124m altitude, 210kton; prototype of the W-58 warhead to be mounted on Polaris A-2 missiles for nuclear submarines

First Earth-to-Satellite TV broadcast with an AT&T Telstar

Ivan Sutherland demonstrates Sketchpad, a 20-year-ahead drawing program, on a Department of Defense TX-2; Sketchpad is the first program to use windows, icons, and a light pen.

The American CORONA spy satellite program is yielding its first results. The infamous missile gap in favor of the Soviets, feared, is a propaganda stunt by Khrushchev: instead of having several hundred ICBMs, the Russians have… six. By 1967, this number will rise to 893,

Kennedy delivers a speech to the United Nations in which he states “Mankind must put an end to war – or war will put an end to mankind.”

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is formed. This secret organization (made public in 1992) will use data collected by the CIA and the US Air Force, primarily via the CORONA spy satellites, to map Soviet nuclear and conventional power.

Khrushchev deemed Kennedy weak both personally, due to his inexperience, and politically, due to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. He sent Kennedy an ultimatum: if he didn’t agree to the creation of a demilitarized zone in Berlin, the USSR would severely restrict NATO access

British lawyer Peter Benson founds Amnesty International

The Americans send a monkey into space on a Mercury-Redstone; it is called Ham and reaches an altitude of 253 km; an on-board television system is tested for the first time, which will be used extensively in the Apollo missions.

Eisenhower approved the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), which finally coordinated the strategic nuclear weapons objectives of the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Navy. It envisioned 3,729 targets, with over 1,000 ground zeros hit by 3,423 nuclear weapons. These were located in the

Earthquake in Chile: >9 Richter scale, 4000 dead Together with the 1964 Alaska earthquake it released 60% of the total energy released by all earthquakes this century

Charles Stark Draper, an authority on guidance and control, states that “beyond any doubt, the credit for the development of an inertial guidance system (INS) belongs to the group of German scientists who developed the V-2 at Peenemunde.”

USSR. Zvezchny Gorodok (Star Town). Star City. Founded in 1960. 310 hectares of birch trees were cleared to make way for the secret city. Closed to the public until the fall of the USSR. It is now reached by getting off at Tsiolkovsky stop, 17

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider publishes “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” “Lick” can be considered one of the fathers, or the father of, the Internet. Working for SAGE at Lincoln Laboratories (a military-funded institution affiliated with MIT), he developed concepts such as decentralized networks, time-sharing multitasking, and facilitated human-machine

Europeans in Algeria rebel in the so-called “days of the barricades”

The center-right Tambroni government was born and died in the space of a few months, after several street riots; it was replaced by a new Fanfani government.

Sony markets the first all-transistor television

The American nuclear submarine Triton completes a submerged circumnavigation of the globe.

Arizona. Eugene Shoemaker (the man behind the comet of the same name, and also an instructor for the Apollo astronauts), armed with a hammer, explores the rim of Meteor Crater, along with Edward Chao. They find extremely rare minerals such as coesite and stishovite, which

China. With Mao’s Great Leap Forward, China was hit by one of the worst famines in history, resulting in the deaths of over 40 million people.

First automatic computerized control system in a Texaco refinery

Arthur Samuel, an engineer at IBM, coined the term machine learning. The technique would experience three waves of enthusiasm and two AI winters of disappointment: the first in the 1970s and 1980s, and the second in the 1990s. At the beginning of the 21st century,

Just a year after Jack Kilby invented them, the MIT Instrumentation Lab received the first integrated circuits produced by Texas Instruments. MIT purchased 64 of them at a price of $1,000 each. The order was, “Go out and buy a large quantity of those things

Jay Lathrop began working at Texas Instruments. With his assistant, James Nall, they had the brilliant idea of turning the microscope upside down, so that it reduced the image rather than enlarged it, thus projecting a smaller version of the circuit onto the germanium. They

Second Taiwan Crisis. The Chinese People’s Army begins another massive bombardment of the coastal islands disputed a few years earlier. After 15 days, the bombardment ceases, only to resume for another 29 consecutive days. Finally, the Chinese adopt the almost farcical system of bombing the

Asian flu epidemic: a quarter of the planet’s population is infected

MJ Sparnaay observes the Casimir effect for the first time in a dedicated scientific experiment. Ten years earlier, Dutch physicist Henrik Casimir had demonstrated that quantum mechanics can create negative energy, discovering “virtual” particles that are continuously created and annihilated in an absolute vacuum.