Egyptian President Nasser dies

The Soviet probe Luna 16 successfully completed its mission and brought back 101g of lunar soil.

Black September. Yasir Arafat hatches a plan to oust the Hashemites from Jordan, a key ally of the United States and an unofficial ally of Israel. The Syrians move troops into the area, prompting an Israeli air force response to block the Syrian soldiers, while the Americans call in Pakistani soldiers to assist the Jordanians in controlling the situation. Approximately 10,000 Palestinians are killed in the fighting, and Arafat flees to Lebanon. These events are referenced by the terrorist organization that massacres the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

4:08 AM Italian time: Apollo 13: Haise calls Mission Control Center: “Okay, Houston; we’ve had a problem.”

Launch of Apollo 13. Target: the Fra Mauro Hills on the Moon. It will never get there. Two days later, they will have a serious accident with the Service Module. But it will still be “a very successful failure.” Apollo 13 (Saturn V SA-508): James Lovell, John Swigert, and Fred Haise attempt the third lunar landing with the Command Module Odyssey and the Lunar Module Aquarius; the attempt is aborted after an oxygen tank explodes; they nevertheless complete a lunar orbit and use the LM’s engine to enter reentry orbit. PS: Apollo 14 will actually reach the Fra Mauro Hills…

USRR. The design bureaus headed by Chelomei and Mishin were forcibly put to work together, by order of Ustinov. Thus the Salyut was born, a combination of the Almaz and the Soyuz onboard systems.

Hawking-Penrose Singularity Theorem: With the assumptions of 1) sufficiently smooth space-time, 2) impossible time travel, 3) sufficient matter and radiation in the Universe, 4) general relativity, 5) mass density always prevails over matter pressure (strong energetic condition); then the Universe was born from a singularity.

The first GTOs and Triacs are introduced to the market

The world’s population living in extreme poverty, which has been increasing since 1820 in absolute terms (not percentage), is beginning to decline, even as the total world population continues to grow, and by a significant amount. The world’s population living in extreme poverty, after peaking at 2 billion people in 1970, will decline almost steadily, reaching 700 million people in the first decades of the 21st century. Over the same period, the total world population will increase from 4 to 8 billion.

American mathematician Stephen Cook, while completing his PhD in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, discovers the SAT (Satisfiability) for NP-Complete (Non-deterministic, Polynomially time-bounded) problems: solving any NP-complete problem is equivalent to solving any instance of SAT (by the year 2000, over 2000 different NP-complete problems were known).

Bell Labs, NY: From an offshoot of the BCPL, used in the Multics project, Thompson develops the B language (predecessor of C)

West Germany. Prime Minister Willy Brandt. This is the first Social Democratic government in postwar Germany, following two decades of conservative Konrad Adenauer. Brandt, for the first time, accepts the Older Neisse River border as Germany’s easternmost border, thus putting an end to Germany’s claim to the territories of Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania, lost in World War II. It is noteworthy that as late as 1972, the Christian Democrats of the CDU declared that if they won (and lost) the 1972 elections, they would tear up these treaties. Finally, Brandt visits the Warsaw Ghetto, where he is photographed kneeling and apologizes for Nazi crimes.

Comet Bennett is discovered by South African amateur astronomer John Bennett. The comet approaches Earth while the Apollo 13 mission is en route to the Moon. Just as the astronauts begin maneuvering to turn the Command Module toward the comet for a photo, the oxygen tank explodes (“Houston, we’ve had a problem”), causing the famous failure. (They say comets aren’t bad luck—but truth be told, they managed to re-enter, so they were lucky…)

7:38 PM (Italian time): Apollo 12: Pete Conrad walks to Surveyor 3 and removes the camera and other objects to bring them back to Earth for analysis after more than two years on the Moon.

In the Kilby vs. Noyce case, pitting Texas Instruments against Fairchild Semiconductors over the first patent on integrated circuits, which began in 1959, after Fairchild’s final appeal of the court’s ruling, the court ultimately overturned the verdict and awarded the patent to Fairchild. Texas appealed to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. Ultimately, however, the integrated circuit market would be so vast and advanced compared to the original patent that the two companies agreed to grant each other cross-licenses.

ARPANET Project. The first IMP (Interface Message Processor, now called Router), built by BBN, arrives at UCLA. It’s the size of a large refrigerator, housed in a sturdy, dark gray iron cabinet, as per military specifications. BBN did a great job delivering on time and on budget. A second IMP will be delivered to SRI at Stanford in September, and the ARPANET can begin operating!

ARPANET Project. Host-to-IMP standards are ready, based on responses to RFC1 (Request for Comments) distributed to interested parties by Larry Roberts, project manager for the project.

Judith Love Cohen worked in the aerospace industry from 1952 to 1990, including working on the guidance system for the Minuteman missile and then the Abort-Guidance System in the Apollo Lunar Module. The AGS played a key role in the safe return of Apollo 13 after an oxygen tank explosion damaged the service module and forced the astronauts to use the lunar module as a “lifeboat.” Power and water supplies on the LM were limited, and the primary guidance and navigation system used excessive water for cooling. After the LM’s descent engine burned two hours after the lunar flyby to shorten the journey home, the AGS was used for most of the return, including two mid-course corrections. On August 28, 1969, shortly after the Apollo 11 mission, Judith Love Cohen gave birth. Her son (the fourth) was named Jack Black. That Jack Black…

James Fergason discovers the twisted nematic (TN) effect; a fundamental discovery since all the LCD monitors we are familiar with are based on the principle of rotating the polarization plane.

Xinjiang, Western China. In a major battle, the Soviets annihilate an entire Chinese battalion near the border. In this climate, China develops the need to establish contact with the United States.

Quarantine at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston finally ends for the three Apollo 11 astronauts.