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United States. Lead is banned from gasoline and paint. The blood lead concentration of bumblebees dropped more than 80% from 1976 to 1999. A scientific study claims that American children in 1999 had an IQ between 2.2 and 4.7 points higher than their peers in

The first prototype of the Space Shuttle orbiter, the Enterprise, is completed.

Howard Hughes dies.

Space Shuttle Main Engines Complete First 60-Second Test

China. The FSW is China’s first recoverable satellite: it reenters the atmosphere after three days. China is the third nation to have recoverable satellites, after the United States and the Soviet Union.

With the support of 60,000 Cuban soldiers and 25,000 Soviet military advisors, the MPLA seizes power in Angola, but the civil war will continue for another 14 years.

Beijing, China. John Bardeen (co-inventor of the transistor and Nobel Prize winner for it, and then again for superconductivity) arrives at the airport in the Chinese capital. In March 1978, Den Xiaoping will place semiconductors at the center of his agenda.

Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP): launch of the Saturn IB SA-210, this was the first meeting in orbit between crews from two different nations (three Americans and two Soviets), an even more important fact given the tense relations between the two superpowers.

Sunday. 10:00 PM. Steve Wozniak, after working all day at his post at HP, goes home for a quick dinner and then returns to work. At 10:00 PM, he finally types on the keyboard, and the letters appear on the screen… Wozniak is impressed: it’s

Cambodia. Phnom Penh is conquered by communist rebels: Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Two million people are forced to leave the cities to work in the fields.

King Faisal is assassinated. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, King Faisal is shot dead by his nephew, Prince Faisal Ibn Musaid. Son of King Ibn Saud, Faisal had fought in the military campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s that gave rise to modern Saudi Arabia. He

Journalist Jack Anderson reveals Project Azorian (the recovery of the Soviet submarine K-129) on the nationally popular Mutual Radio Network show. He reruns it twice that same evening. The cover is blown. Project Azorian aimed to return to the ocean floor to recover the submarine’s

Menlo Park, California. In Gordon French’s garage, a meeting of about thirty electronics enthusiasts is being held. The topic of the day is the new Altair. The meeting is convened by Fred Moore. The club is called the Homebrew Computer Club. Among the attendees is

Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and Monte Davidsson complete the first BASIC interpreter, one of the first software packages for the Altair 8800. Allen takes it to Ed Roberts of Altair. It takes him 10 minutes to load the software into the machine. The code was

Paul Allen, waving his copy of Popular Electronics with an Altair 8800, shouts at Bill Gates, “Hey, this thing is happening without us!” Bill is persuaded to leave Harvard to write software for Altair. They write a BASIC interpreter. Then he calls Altair, giving the

Paul Allen, as soon as he sees the new issue of Popular Electronics, with the Altair 8800 on the cover, is excited and curious. He buys it for 75 cents and rushes to bring it to his high school friend Bill Gates’s Harvard dorm. Bill,

OLIVETTI presents the SIGMA robot for assembly operations, one of the first robotic applications in this sector

Benoit Mandelbrot: Geometric Theory of Fractals

Death of Spanish dictator Franco, beginning of the democratization process

40 degrees North, 180 degrees West, North Pacific. The CIA’s Hughes Glomar Explorer begins the lengthy procedure of lowering the Clementine tool to collect K-129 from the ocean floor.

NASA purchased a Boeing 747 aircraft from American Airlines to transport the Space Shuttle from one place to another; the alternative, proposed by Lokheed, was to use two C-5As side by side and attached together.

40 degrees North, 180 degrees West, North Pacific. The CIA ship Hughes Glomar Explorer has company: the radar ship Chazhma (which set sail from Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka to support a Soyuz launch) arrives. A helicopter lifts off from the Soviet ship, flies closely over the

The CIA ship Hughes Glomar Explorer arrives 40 degrees north, 180 degrees west, at the site of the Soviet K-129 sinking. It positions itself and maintains its position actively through early use of GPS (the first satellites have just been launched). The GPS receiver fills

The charm quark is discovered

India detonates its first nuclear device: 10-15Kton

Israel. Maalot massacre: A Palestinian attack kills 21 Israeli students.

Referendum on divorce. 59.3% of voters voted against repealing the law: the gap between those in favor of divorce and those against it was about 20%, and even in the South, where the Church’s voice was traditionally more listened to, the majority voted in favor

England. After more than thirty years of silence, the secrets of Bletchley Park are beginning to surface. Winterbotham’s book, “The Ultra Secret,” is published. Captain Winterbotham, in fact, had been insisting to the British government for some time that there was no longer any reason

A revolution overthrows Ethiopian monarch Haile Selassie; a military junta, the Derg, takes power; among them is Manghitsu Haile Mariam, who will become the head of the government.

Joel Scherk and John Schwarz show that string theory could describe the gravitational force but only if the tension in the string were extremely high (10^39 tons)

After lengthy negotiations, the release of American prisoners in Vietnam is implemented; but there are also last-minute “surprises”: although the American plane arrives in Vietnam several hours early, the North Vietnamese tell the prisoners that the United States did not send the plane to pick

The second generation of CPUs is born: Intel 8080 (5000 transistors), Motorola 6800, Texas Instruments TMS1000

CINCINNATI MILACRON introduces the first computer-controlled industrial robot, the T3 (The Tomorrow Tool)

NPO Energomash (OKB-456) is the famous Gas Dynamics Lab founded in Leningrad immediately after the Revolution, associated with Valentin Glushko. It later merged with Korolev’s OKB-1, when Glushko became its head in 1974. Privately held since 1998, it employs 6,500 people. It produces the following

Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, in an article in Nature, explain the link between CFCs and the ozone hole. The treaty to reduce CFCs was signed in September 1987 by 197 countries. The ozone hole is shrinking, and it is estimated that it will

The third Skylab crew blasts off on Saturn IB SA-208; they spend 84 days in orbit.

First experimental success of the laser: shooting down a model airplane from a few kilometers away in New Mexico

Mariner 10 is launched, flying past Venus on its Mercury flyby, transmitting 4,165 images. Its orbit was suggested by the brilliant intuition of Professor Bepi Colombo of the Institute of Applied Mechanics in Padua. Mercury 10 thus made a first Venus flyby, followed by a

massive Saturn V rocket lifts off from Kennedy Space Center carrying three men to an extraordinary destination, which they reach after a four-month journey on March 3, 1974. The destination is the planet Venus, for the first manned interplanetary spaceflight: an extreme mission, allowing only

Nobel Prize in Physics to Leo Eeaski and Ivar Giaever for discoveries of tunneling in semiconductors and superconductors respectively

Wheeler emphasizes Max Planck’s 1906 idea of Planck-Wheeler units by adopting it throughout his writings, but assuming G=c=h=k=1 and deriving e=1/SQR(137) (rather than G=c=k=e=1 as Planck had done).

Ethernet network developed at Xerox PARC

SRI develops WAVE, the first computer programming language developed in research

Initial revelations about the Ultra decryption program, which significantly influenced the events of World War II. Gradually, other aspects emerged (such as the role of the Colossus computer, the Venona program, etc.). In retrospect, it is indeed remarkable that for a quarter of a century,

Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark join the European Community. Britain’s previous two attempts had been vetoed in 1963 and again in 1967. De Gaulle died in 1971 and could not veto the vote. Great Britain formally joined in 1973. In 2016, Great Britain voted to

Oil crisis: OPEC countries multiply oil prices: crude oil goes from $3 to $13 a barrel, causing an oil crisis in the West and heavy debts of developing countries to the World Bank, debt that will remain for many years to come and that will

Long Beach, California. The Hughes Glomar Explorer, a covert CIA vessel, arrives at Pier E, the Hughes Pier, near where the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’s famous plane, is parked.

Valparaiso, Chile. Just as the coup d’état is underway in Chile, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a covert CIA vessel, passes through the Strait, en route to the North Pacific, to fish out the K-129.

Chile: Salvador Allende kills himself with the machine gun given to him by Fidel Castro, shortly before his capture during the coup carried out by the Chilean military with the support of the CIA. Pinochet will prove to be a sadistic and skilled dictator: he

British Aerospace and McDonnell Douglas make the first Harrier operational

Moon mission veteran Pete Conrad joins Joe Kerwin on the mission to repair the solar panels of the newly launched Skylab space station, which has a blocked solar panel.

America’s first orbiting station: Skylab

Grumman makes the F-14 Tomcat operational

The two Americans Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer demonstrate that it is possible to manipulate DNA to obtain a drug produced by bacteria: somatostatin; this is the birth certificate of genetic engineering.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google with Larry Page, is born.

Martin Marietta (later Lockheed Martin) wins the contract to produce the Space Shuttle External Tank, which is manufactured at the Michoud facility in Louisiana; it uses the same factory used to build the Saturn V first stage; by 1996 it had revenues of $6.7 billion,

United Space Boosters and Thiokol Award Contracts for Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters

At 12:00 an A7 Corsair dropped the last bomb of the Vietnam conflict.

A new Skylab crew blasts off on Saturn IB SA-207; they spend 59 days in orbit.

United States. Just returned from Skylab, the Skylab 2 crew—Pete Conrad, Joseph Kerwin, and Paul Weitz—are picked up by a SeaKing helicopter from the deck of the USS Ticonderoga. They will meet with American President Nixon and his guest, Soviet President Brezhnev. Conrad is kindly

The explosion of a 3-megaton nuclear device in the atmosphere at high altitude by China was observed by the American Skylab on behalf of the CIA.

Francis Crick suggests that extraterrestrial civilizations may have purposely sent spores to other worlds aboard unmanned probes (guided panspermia)

In the United States, the amount of lead in gasoline began to be progressively reduced, finally eliminating it completely in 1986. The amount of lead in Americans’ blood by 1995 was up to 80% lower than in the 1970s. In Europe, these measures were adopted

The Soviet Luna 21 probe delivers Lunokhod 2 to the Moon: another success for the project team led by Professor Alexander Leonovich Kemurdzhian of the Lavochkin Center in Russia. Part of the project team, as with Lunokhod 1, is Edward Chistov of our association Il

USSR. The Zenit launcher was created by Mikhail Yangel’s Bureau: NPO Yuzhnoye, in 1973, as a rocket for military satellites to be launched from Plesetsk. Due to the toxic pollution caused by the Proton fuel, it was decided to use kerosene, with liquid oxygen, like

USSR. On January 11, 1973, when the second Lunokhod spacecraft blasted off for the Moon, the Apollo missions were over, and the Soviets knew they finally had the Moon all to themselves… The landing site, Taurus Mountains on January 16, was only 180 km from

Egypt expels all Soviet military advisors and will gradually enter the American orbit.

Richard Nixon confirmed at the White House

5 deaths in Italy due to terrorism

Vietnam. American B-52s resume bombing raids in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

North Vietnam: Operation Linebacker II. It is one of the heaviest bombing raids in history. A shock-and-awe campaign of overwhelming air power aimed at subduing a determined adversary that, despite being comprehensively and repeatedly defeated, had resisted everything the world’s most formidable war machine could

NASA launches LandSat 1 Earth-observing satellite

Laugardalshöll Arena, Reykjavik, Iceland. World Chess Championship. Robert James Fischer, aka Bobby Fischer, challenges Soviet player Boris Spassky. The American champion initially refuses to participate in the match, arriving significantly late to the first match and then losing due to a trivial error. For the

North American Rockwell receives NASA contract NAS9-14000, worth $2.6 billion, to build the Space Shuttle orbiter

North Vietnam: Richard Nixon authorizes massive bombing of the country by B-52s; within weeks, the damage is greater than in the previous 10 years of war; the bombing is then suspended when the North Vietnamese agree to peace negotiations.

Lockheed finishes construction of the Clementine capture vehicle for Project Azorian, the vehicle to lock on to the Soviet K-129 diesel-electric nuclear-capable submarine.

Steve Jobs, a senior at Homestead High School and at the height of the hippie era, pushes his dietary experiments to the limit and even retreats to live in a cabin. The following year, he enrolls at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

India-Pakistan War

Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates test their device (an idea from an issue of Esquire a few weeks earlier). It emits the right tones to fool the Bell telephone system, allowing free long-distance calls. They call the Vatican, it works, and Wozniak says he’s Henry

Mariner 9 is the first artificial satellite around Mars