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 of divorce.

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 to keep the secret. Indeed, one of the reasons for maintaining the secret was that the Commonwealth countries, which had been encouraged to use Enigma after the war, had not used it for years. Incredibly, the British had distributed thousands of Enigma machines among the Commonwealth countries, Enigma machines captured at the end of the war (over thirty thousand had been built). These friendly countries were confident that the Enigma code had never been broken and that, having been used by the Nazis, it was the most secure. The British, conveniently, did nothing to disprove this, and continually decrypted the “secret” communications of Commonwealth countries, both political, military and commercial, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.

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 them up out of cowardice; they tell the diplomats on the plane that the prisoners are so happy in Vietnam that they have no intention of returning to America.

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 engine families (Racketny Dvigatel – engines): RD-100 liquid oxygen and non-storable propellant. RD-200 nitrogen and storable propellant (e.g., hydrazine). RD-300 fluorine. RD-400 nuclear. RD-700 tri-propellant.

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 close completely by the middle of the 21st century. Molina and Rowland will win the Nobel Prize in 1995.

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 first Mercury flyby, followed by a second and a third Mercury flyby, thus multiplying the observation opportunities. The mission was very limited in budget: only $98 million. It would ultimately cost $97 million. The subsequent Mariner 11 and 12 missions were renamed, thus terminating the Mariner program. Mariner 11 and 12 are now better known as Voyager 1 and 2.

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 a few frantic hours of low-flying spaceflight before hurtling back home, but it is a political triumph and a further demonstration of NASA’s coordination skills, fresh from the historic success of the Moon landings between 1969 and 1972. The close-up reconnaissance of Venus carried out by American astronauts reveals a wealth of previously unknown data about a scorching, inhospitable world and brings back unforgettable photographs to Earth when it concludes, a year after departure, with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. If you’re thinking you don’t remember this mission and those unforgettable photos, don’t worry: it never happened. But it had been studied and planned in great detail by NASA, as described, for example, in the nearly two hundred pages of the 1967 Manned Venus Flyby report and in many other technical documents from the US space agency. It may seem incredible, but when astronauts hadn’t even been around the Moon, much less landed (Apollo 8, the first circumlunar flight, would take place in December 1968), NASA was already thinking about the post-lunar future. It intended that the infrastructure, Saturn V launchers, and Apollo spacecraft designed for the Moon would be reused in slightly modified form, at relatively modest cost, to open the doors to manned interplanetary exploration.

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, the vast majority of historians suspected nothing.

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 leave the European Union, a decision it would partially withdraw from in 2020.

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 bring these countries to the brink of financial collapse.

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 will rule for the next 18 years. In the first ten days after the coup, he will bring thousands of left-wing opposition figures to the Santiago stadium, who will be interrogated, tortured, and killed.

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, manufacturing more than 120 tanks.

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 invited to Moscow for dinner; he just has to choose the date. Pete replies, “I’ll fly anywhere for a free meal, sir. But let me talk to my wife. I don’t schedule a thing until I’ve cleared it with her”.

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.