1960 in science

The year 1960 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• March 14 – Jodrell Bank Observatory in England makes radio contact with the U.S. Pioneer 5 probe over a distance of 407,000 miles (655,000 km).^[1]
• April–July – Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake begins searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence with Project Ozma at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia.
• April 13 – The United States launches navigation satellite Transit I-b.
• May 15 – Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 4 into Earth orbit.
• June 3 – British-born American theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson proposes the idea of Dyson spheres.^[2]
• August 12 – First experimental Project Echo passive communications satellite goes into orbit.^[3]
• August 19 – Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 5 with the dogs Belka and Strelka, forty mice, two rats and a variety of plants. The spacecraft will return to earth the next day and all animals will be recovered safely.
• Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal invents the artificial language Lincos, intended for communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.

Biology

• February 13
  • Max Perutz publishes the structure of hemoglobin.^[4]
  • John Kendrew publishes the structure of myoglobin.^[5]
• March 5 – British marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy announces his aquatic ape hypothesis, theorising that swimming and diving for food exerted a strong evolutionary effect partly responsible for the divergence in the common descent of humans and other great apes.^[6]
• July – Robert Burns Woodward publishes a total synthesis of chlorophyll.^[7]
• July 14 – English primatologist Jane Goodall arrives at what will become Gombe Stream National Park in Tanganyika to begin her groundbreaking behavioral study of chimpanzees in the wild.
• November 4 – At the Kasakela Chimpanzee Community, Jane Goodall observes a chimpanzee using a grass stalk to extract termites from a termite hill, the first recorded case of tool use by animals.
• Jacques Ruffié invents hemotyping.
• Juan Oro finds that concentrated solutions of ammonium cyanide in water can produce the nucleotide adenine.
• Four independent researchers (Sam Weiss, Jerard Hurwitz, Audrey Stevens and J. Bonner) discover the bacterial RNA polymerase that regulates the polymerization of nucleotides under the control of DNA.^[8]
• Climatron geodesic dome greenhouse opens at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.^[9]

Computer science

• August – Edsger W. Dijkstra and Jaap A. Zonneveld produce the first (X1) implementation of the ALGOL 60 programming language.^[10][11]
• John McCarthy of MIT publishes the Lisp programming language.^[12]

Earth sciences

• May 22 – Valdivia earthquake: Chile's subduction fault ruptures from Talcahuano to the Taitao Peninsula (with its epicenter near Lumaco), causing the most powerful earthquake on record (with a magnitude of 9.5) and a tsunami.
• Harry Hammond Hess proposes the concept of seafloor spreading.^[13][14]

Exploration

• January 23 – Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reach bottom in the Mariana Trench in United States Navy bathyscaphe Trieste at a depth of 10,916 m.
• May 10 – The nuclear submarine USS Triton, under the command of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., completes the first underwater circumnavigation of the Earth.

Mathematics

• Wacław Sierpiński proves the existence of Sierpinski numbers.
• In the classification of finite simple groups, Michio Suzuki and Rimhak Ree introduce Suzuki–Ree groups;^[15][16] and John G. Thompson, Walter Feit and Marshall Hall prove that a group with a fixed-point-free automorphism of prime order is nilpotent, and that all finite simple CN groups of odd order are cyclic.^[17]

Medicine

• April 15 – William C. Chardack implants the first fixed-rate cardiac pacemaker with mercury battery, designed by Wilson Greatbatch.^[18]
• May 2 – The first coronary artery bypass surgery is performed by a team led by Dr. Robert Goetz and thoracic surgeon Dr. Michael Rohman with the assistance of Drs. Jordan Haller and Ronald Dee at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Bronx Municipal Hospital Center in the United States using internal mammary artery as the donor vessel; the patient survives for 9 months.^[19][20]
• May 9 – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces that it will approve birth control as an additional indication for Searle's Enovid, making it the world's first approved combined oral contraceptive pill.
• June 6 – The American Heart Association announces a strong statistical association between heavy cigarette smoking and coronary heart disease.^[21]
• October 30 – The first kidney transplantation in the United Kingdom is performed by a team led by English surgeon Michael Woodruff at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh between identical twins.^[22]

Meteorology

• April 1 – The United States launches the first weather satellite, TIROS-1.

Metrology

• October – 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures establishes International System of Units, abbreviated SI from the French name, Le Système international d'unités.^[23][24]

Paleontology

• November 4 – OH 7, first fragments of Homo habilis, discovered by Jonathan Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.^[25]

Physics

• March 22 – Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes receive the first patent for a laser.
• May 16 – Theodore Maiman demonstrates the first working laser, a ruby laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories.

Technology

• A tungsten halogen lamp bulb is patented by General Electric engineer Fredrick Moby.^[26]
• Prototype Pentax Spotmatic single-lens reflex camera, pioneering through-the-lens metering, is presented.^[27]

Births

• May 3 – Jaron Lanier, American computer scientist.
• October 18 – Craig Mello, American biologist.
• December 24 – Carol Vorderman, British mathematician.

Deaths

• April 24 – Max von Laue (born 1879), German physicist, winner of the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• May 8 – J. H. C. Whitehead (born 1904), British mathematician.
• June 17 – Sir Harold Gillies (born 1882), New Zealand-born plastic surgeon.

References