1960 in science

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

Astronomy and space exploration

• August 11 – The return capsule of the U.S. Discoverer 13 Corona mission is successfully recovered from the Pacific Ocean, the first time any man-made object has been recovered successfully from orbit.^[1]
• September – A Soviet SS-2 Sibling missile is successfully launched in a suborbital test from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the first Chinese spaceflight.
• October 4 – The U.S. Army Courier 1B, the world's first active communications repeater satellite, is launched into low earth orbit.

Biology

• February 13
  • Max Perutz publishes the structure of hemoglobin.^[2]
  • John Kendrew publishes the structure of myoglobin.^[3]
• 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.^[4]
• July – Robert Burns Woodward publishes a total synthesis of chlorophyll.^[5]
• 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.^[6]
• Climatron geodesic dome greenhouse opens at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.^[7]

Computer science

• August – Edsger W. Dijkstra and Jaap A. Zonneveld produce the first (X1) implementation of the ALGOL 60 programming language.^[8][9]
• John McCarthy of MIT publishes the Lisp programming language.^[10]

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.^[11][12]

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.
• Stanko Bilinski rediscovers the Bilinski dodecahedron.^[13]
• In the classification of finite simple groups, Michio Suzuki and Rimhak Ree introduce Suzuki–Ree groups;^[14][15] 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.^[16]

Medicine

• April 15 – William C. Chardack implants the first fixed-rate cardiac pacemaker with mercury battery, designed by Wilson Greatbatch.^[17]
• 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.^[18][19]
• 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.^[20]
• 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.^[21]

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.^[22][23]

Paleontology

• November 4 – OH 7, first fragments of Homo habilis, discovered by Jonathan Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.^[24]

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.^[25]
• Prototype Pentax Spotmatic single-lens reflex camera, pioneering through-the-lens metering, is presented.^[26]

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.
• September 22 – Melanie Klein (born 1882), Austrian-British psychoanalyst.

References