S

In Indonesia, a coup attributed to communists is foiled; Mohamed Suharto’s military kills 500,000 communists or suspected communists, and Suharto emerges as a leader and becomes president of the country that same year. At 3:15 a.m., 2,000 rebel soldiers take seven Indonesian generals hostage. Three

The Saturn V’s second stage, the S-II, breaks apart during a test at Seal Beach.

Vietnam. Yet another coup in South Vietnam. This time, Air Force General Nguyen Cao Ky takes power. Shortly thereafter, Johnson sends more troops, bringing the total to 125,000. McNamara tells his colleagues, “We’re in a hell of a mess.”

At Caltech, Gary Flandro studies the interplanetary Grand Tour later put into practice by Voyager 2

Cambridge: Stephen Hawking uses Penrose’s results and applies them to the Big Bang

Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle would become famous for Public Key Cryptography, while Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman would become famous for RSA, the most practical implementation of Public Key Cryptography. However, it would be discovered many years later that in

Gemini-Titan 3: Gus Grissom and John Young perform orbital maneuvers aboard the Molly Brown. The legendary Gus, who would lose his life on Apollo 1, and the great John Young, who would also fly on Gemini 10, Apollo 10 again, would walk (and pilot) on

Stan Lee is the editor and writer and Jack Kirby the artist for Marvel of a “family” of superheroes that make up the Fantastic Four, first published in 1961, The Incredible Hulk (1962), Iron Man and the X-Men (1963), Daredevil (in the original Daredevil, 1964)

fourth 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.

Yarmouth Castle ferry catches fire, killing 90 people

Tokyo Olympics

US President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act in favor of integration with the black population.

United States. Senator Russell told President Johnson in a phone call regarding Vietnam: “This is the worst mess I’ve ever seen… I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this without fighting a bigger war against the Chinese… This is something we can’t

The Beatles make their first appearance on American television, from the New York studio of the Ed Sullivan Show. It immediately becomes a revolution in customs, a generational identity, a signal of epochal change. In the fall of 1964, the Free Speech Movement explodes in

From the Algerian desert, France launched a cat into space. Felicette, a cat, aboard a Veronique rocket, developed from the German V-2 rocket. The flight lasted 15 minutes, reaching an altitude of 157 kilometers. Upon returning to earth, the parachutes opened and the cat returned

Andy Grove began working for Fairchild. He arrived in New York in 1956, after fleeing the Hungarian communist regime, and enrolled in a PhD program at Berkeley. He would later become president and CEO of Intel.

Licklider, the father of the Internet concept, describes his vision with the intentionally grandiloquent phrase “the Integralactic Computer Network.” In April 1963, he wrote a memo to ARPA IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office) affiliates, urging them to consider networks of different computers, concluding that it

Norfolk, Suffolk, England. A military plane carrying 70kg of a special cadmium zinc sulfide pigment released it 150m downwind of the city. On the ground, chemical defense officials from Porton Down in Whitstable stationed themselves at 40 locations and collected samples. Decades later, the documents

Second Vietnam War.

Iraq. A coup brings the country into the Soviet orbit.

Cuban Missile Crisis: Eleven American naval vessels, responsible for the naval blockade of Cuba, detect the Soviet Foxtrot-class diesel submarine B59. It is armed with nuclear torpedoes, but the Americans are unaware of this. The Americans release depth charges to force the submarine to surface.

Cuban Missile Crisis. DEFCON 2 for the first time in history. Thousands of nuclear weapons are on high alert, ready for use or already loaded onto aircraft in flight or submarines off the coast of the USSR. Hundreds of thousands of US Army soldiers are

Cuban Missile Crisis. 250,000 American soldiers are preparing for the invasion of Cuba. On the island, 43,000 Soviet military advisers are training with the Cuban army.

Kennedy declared that any missile launched from Cuban bases would be considered a Soviet attack and would be responded to with maximum available firepower.

Johnston Island, Operation FishBowl; “CheckMate” rocket detonation at 146 km altitude, 60 kton; testing of the W-39 anti-ballistic missile warhead

Independence of Algeria.

Second Vatican Council (XXI Ecumenical Council) convened by John XXIII

Ivrea. A team of four engineers led by Pier Giorgio Perotto began designing and building the Programma 101, the first personal computer. This electronic calculator was presented at the New York World Fair in October 1965, causing a sensation and amazement. It cost $3,200, compared

Centralia, Pennsylvania. The underground coal seam catches fire and burns slowly. After half a century, the blaze has still not been extinguished, and the entire area has been virtually abandoned.

Launch of Mercury-Atlas 7 and the Aurora 7 probe with Scott Carpenter aboard; this is the first probe with an automatic attitude control system (12 thrusters).

800km east-northeast of Christmas Island, Operation Dominic, “Frigate Bird” rocket detonation at 3400m altitude, 600kton; this is the only American test of a ballistic missile with an active nuclear warhead; the missile is launched from the Ethan Allen ship and travels 1890km in space before

Robert White, aboard an X-15, and wearing a spacesuit similar to those of the Mercury missions, flies at an altitude of 88km

Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, is executed in Israel.

WD Hamilton and GC Williams complete the gene’s point of view on evolution, within the framework of neo-Darwinism: the fundamental unit of life is the Replicator, that is, the gene. Over time, only the most efficient ones have survived in large numbers. Among them, those

Andy Warhol creates the first acrylics depicting Marilyn Monroe and Coca Cola

Slavery is abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen

United States. First Lyme disease epidemic. It is transmitted by mouse or deer bites.

Goldsboro, North Carolina. A B-52 flying over the base, after an in-flight refueling, begins to leak fuel. Further problems cause the plane to spin uncontrollably. The plane is carrying two 4,000-ton Mark-39 bombs. The bombs are released due to the plane’s centrifugal force. The first

The US Navy deploys the first Enterprise-class aircraft carrier (with eight nuclear reactors on board); given its extremely high costs, it will remain the only one of this class, also remaining the longest (even though the Nimitz-class have a greater tonnage).

UNIMATE robot installed at Ford Motor Company to work with a die casting machine

Japan. Doctor Noboru Hagino publishes his findings on the causes of the widespread disease among the families of miners at the Kamioke mine. In 1972, the mining company compensates the 178 survivors. Cadmium will remain in the collective imagination of the Japanese for generations, so

First successful launch of a Mercury-Redstone

Korolev tries again and launches two dogs with Sputnik 5 (Vostok had failed in the task): Belka and Strelka; after a day in space they return safe and sound.

Korolev attempts to launch a Vostok capsule with two dogs on board: Chaika and Lisichka, but the R7M carrier rocket explodes on the launch pad.

“The 4-Inch Flight”: The Mercury-Redstone 1, a U.S. Navy launch vehicle, lifts off the ground by just four inches before shutting down, miraculously remaining upright; the accidental shutdown then causes the onboard logic to eject the space capsule, which lands near the politicians’ stands; the

Chrysler is selected from among five candidates as contractor to build the Saturn I

The American nuclear submarine USS George Washington, a few months after launching the first pair of Polaris missiles, is on patrol with 16 nuclear warheads on board.

President Eisenhower receives a report asking him to evaluate the option of a lunar exploration program. The requested budget is $26–38 billion. Some in the Oval Office comment that requests to visit other planets would follow. These are the months when Gary Powers is on

Corona Program: At 8:15 a.m., President Ike Eisenhower has photos of the Corona 14 satellite on his desk. The amount of information received from a single mission exceeds the sum of all the U-2 missions combined. Only then does the advantage of this technology become

David Ben Gurion declares to the world the capture of Adolf Eichmann

Gary Power’s U-2 mission over the Soviet Union was the last of 24 overflight missions over the USSR in four years.

The American nuclear submarine USS Halibut launches its first cruise missile, the Regulus (which will soon be obsolete, replaced by the Polaris).

The Mossad, which had been shadowing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina for some time, confirmed it was him when he showed up at his home on an anniversary with a bouquet of flowers; Eichmann had been tracked down in Argentina by Nazi hunter Wiesenthal.

Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California suggests that RNA may be the precursor to proteins and DNA

Lynn Margulis develops the theory that mitochondria were once life forms in their own right, then ingested (at the bacterial level we can speak of infection/invasion/symbiosis between two species) by cells

In 1959 the Soviets launched 3 satellites, one failure, the Americans 11 satellites, 8 failures

Great Kham Uprising in Eastern Tibet

California Institute of Technology (CalTech). Richard Feynman delivers a famous speech, which has gone down in history as “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.” It marks the birth of nanotechnology.

This CORONA spy satellite launch also encountered problems with the film, which didn’t fit properly into the chamber. After investigations and experiments by Kodak, it was discovered that the acetate film (3 mm thick) completely dries out in the extreme vacuum of space and becomes

Lee Oswald moved to the Soviet Union. He lived there until June 1962, when he returned to the United States. He assassinated President Kennedy in November 1963.

The nuclear reactor at the Euratom center in Ispra, Varese, Italy, begins operation.

Independence uprising in Belgian Congo; bloodily repressed by Belgian soldiers

Alaska and Hawaii become states of the United States

Lockheed Aircraft makes first C-130 operational

The Canton of Vaud (Switzerland) allows women to vote

The first experimental drip irrigation system was installed in 1959 in Israel by Blass, where he himself developed and patented the first practical dripper method for surface drip irrigation. This method proved very successful, and its use soon spread (in the 1960s) to Australia, North

Aboard Juno I, rhesus monkeys Able and Baker made a suborbital flight of more than 2,000 km, in preparation for the Mercury launches.

Infiltration into South Vietnam begins via the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Two Soviet government decrees authorized the parallel development of a manned spacecraft (project 3K), a simplified prototype (1K), and a photoreconnaissance satellite (2K). All with the same design (project OD-2). All these projects received the additional designation Vostok (Est in Russian). They are therefore, respectively,

Texas Instruments publicizes the invention of the monolithic chip, demonstrated by Jack Kilby a few months earlier. It calls it Solid Circuit, and Texas calls it Solid State Technology. Fairchild calls it The Planar Process.

Eugene P. Wigner states that “the enormous utility of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious.”

Corona program (first American spy satellites): first launch aborted due to technical errors

East Africa. Outbreak of O’nyong-nyong fever, transmitted from monkeys to people via mosquitoes. Millions of Africans become infected, but natural resistance develops and immunity to the virus.

China. Great Leap Forward. Mao aims to reach Western levels of development within a few years. It will lead to one of the greatest famines in modern history and cause a profound rift within the Communist Party. Metal production is so scarce as to be

Frederic Joliot, husband of Irene Curie, dies in Paris.

Johnston Island, Operation HardTack I, “Orange” thermonuclear rocket detonation at 43km altitude, 3.8Mton, testing of the W-39 warhead in the anti-ballistic missile version

Jack Kilby, slow of speech and sunburned by the Kansas sun, begins working for Texas Instruments. He will create the integrated circuit using monolithic technology a few weeks later. As a new hire, he is not entitled to summer vacations, and he spends them developing

In Hungary, Prime Minister Imre Nagy is executed by the Soviets; Togliatti gives his approval in a letter to Stalin, on the condition that the execution takes place after the elections in Italy.

Tsunami in Lituya Bay, Alaska, with a 525m high wave

The dynamiting of Ripple Rock represents perhaps the largest intentional non-nuclear explosion of all time. It is a rock on the coast of western North America that impeded navigation in British Columbia.