1959 in science
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The year 1959 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Contents |
[edit] 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]
[edit] Biology
- January 1 - Cultivars of plants named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin.
- March 26 - Jersey Zoo 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.[2][3]
[edit] Chemistry
- B. J. Davis and Leonard Ornstein first describe the use of acrylamide in gel electrophoresis at a scientific meeting.[4]
[edit] 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.
[edit] History of science
- Society for the History of Technology begins publication of the journal Technology and Culture.
[edit] Medicine
- July - The medical research group studying Minamata disease comes to the conclusion that mercury is the cause.[5]
- Joseph Murray performs the world's first successful allotransplantation.[6]
- First known case of human HIV, in the Belgian Congo.[7]
[edit] Physics
- Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm predict the Aharonov-Bohm effect.
[edit] 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.[8]
- Pilkington Brothers patent the float glass process invented by Alastair Pilkington.[9]
[edit] 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.
[edit] Awards
[edit] Births
- August 3 - Koichi Tanaka, Japanese chemist (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002).
- December 25 - Michael P. Anderson (died 2003), American astronaut.
- Saul Perlmutter, American astrophysicist (Nobel Prize in Physics 2011).
[edit] 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)
[edit] Organisations
- Austria joins CERN.
[edit] References
- ^ "Coma Berenicids". Meteor Showers Online. http://meteorshowersonline.com/showers/coma_berenicids.html. Retrieved 2011-11-08.
- ^ Chang, M. C. (1959). "Fertilization of Rabbit Ova in vitro". Nature 184 (4684): 466–67. doi:10.1038/184466a0. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v184/n4684/pdf/184466a0.pdf. Retrieved 2011-08-15.
- ^ Greep, Roy O. (1991). "Min Chueh Chang". Biographical Memoirs. United States National Academy of Sciences. http://books.nap.edu//html/biomems/mchang.html. Retrieved 2011-08-15.
- ^ "Disc Electrophoresis". http://www.pipeline.com/~lenornst/DiscElectrophoresis.html. Retrieved 2011-10-16.
- ^ "Minamata disease". United Nations University. http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu35ie/uu35ie0c.htm. Retrieved 2010-10-17.
- ^ Machado, Calixto (2005). "The first organ transplant from a brain-dead donor". Neurology 64 (11): 1938–42. http://www.neurology.org/content/64/11/1938.full.
- ^ Pence, G. E. (2008). "Preventing the Global Spread of AIDS". Medical Ethics: Accounts of the Cases That Shaped and Define Medical Ethics. New York: McGraw-Hill. p. 330.
- ^ Gould, R. Gordon (1959). "The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". In Franken, P.A. and Sands, R.H. (Eds.). The Ann Arbor Conference on Optical Pumping, the University of Michigan, 15 June through 18 June 1959. p. 128. OCLC 02460155.
- ^ Challoner, Jack, ed. (2009). 1001 Inventions That Changed the World. London: Cassell. p. 754. ISBN 978-1-84403-611-0.
