1959 in science

The year 1959 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• August 7 – The United States launches Explorer 6 from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
• September 15 – Russian probe Luna 3 sends back first photos of the far side of Earth's Moon.
• September 19 – Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison establish the scientific rationale for SETI with the publishing of their seminal paper "Searching for Interstellar Communications" in Nature.
• November 24 – Yardymli meteorite makes a landfall in Azerbaijan.
• December 4 – Little Joe 2, a mission in the Mercury program, carries Sam the monkey into space.
• Coma Berenicids discovered.^[1]
• First successful test of a nuclear thermal rocket engine, as part of Project Rover at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States under Raemer Schreiber.^[2]

Biology

• January 1 – Cultivars of plants named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin.
• March 26 – Jersey Zoo (now Durrell Wildlife Park) established by Gerald Durrell.
• August 8 – Min Chueh Chang reports the first mammals, a litter of rabbits, grown from ova having undergone in vitro fertilisation and transferred to a surrogate mother.^[3][4]

Chemistry

• B. J. Davis and Leonard Ornstein first describe the use of acrylamide in gel electrophoresis at a scientific meeting.^[5]

Computer science

• IBM ship the transistor-based IBM 1401 mainframe.
• Edsger W. Dijkstra rediscovers 'Prim's algorithm'.
• December – The specification for the programming language COBOL is completed.

History of science

• Society for the History of Technology begins publication of the journal Technology and Culture.

Mathematics

• Kenkichi Iwasawa initiates Iwasawa theory.^[6]

Medicine

• July – The medical research group studying Minamata disease comes to the conclusion that mercury is the cause.^[7]
• Joseph Murray performs the world's first successful allotransplantation.^[8]
• Georges Mathé, a French oncologist, performs the first bone marrow transplant on five Yugoslavian nuclear workers whose own marrow has been damaged by intense irradiation caused by a criticality accident at the Vinča Nuclear Institute, but all of these transplants are rejected.^[9][10][11]
• First known case of human HIV, in the Belgian Congo.^[12]

Physics

• Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm predict the Aharonov–Bohm effect.

Technology

• Agfa introduces the first fully automatic camera, the Optima.
• Eveready Battery engineer Lewis Urry invents the long-lasting alkaline battery.
• Gordon Gould publishes the term Laser.^[13]
• Pilkington Brothers patent the float glass process invented by Alastair Pilkington.^[14]

Events

• May 7 – Scientist and novelist C. P. Snow delivers an influential Rede Lecture on The Two Cultures, concerning a perceived breakdown of communication between the sciences and humanities, in the Senate House, University of Cambridge. It is subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Emilio Gino Segrè, – Owen Chamberlain
  • Chemistry – Jaroslav Heyrovský
  • Medicine – Severo Ochoa, Arthur Kornberg

Births

• August 3 – Koichi Tanaka, Japanese chemist (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002).
• August 29 – Stephen Wolfram, British-born mathematician.
• September 22 – Saul Perlmutter, American astrophysicist (Nobel Prize in Physics 2011).
• December 25 – Michael P. Anderson (died 2003), American astronaut.

Deaths

• February 15 – Sir Owen Richardson (born 1879), English physicist (Nobel Prize in Physics 1928)
• June 9 – Adolf Windaus (born 1876) German chemist (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1928)
• September 30 – Ross Granville Harrison (born 1870), American physiologist
• October 29 – Samuel James Cameron (born 1878), Scottish obstetrician.
• November 15 – C. T. R. Wilson (born 1869), Scottish physicist (Nobel Prize in Physics 1927)

Organisations

• Austria joins CERN.

References