1959 in science

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

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 6 – At Cape Canaveral, Florida, the first successful test firing of a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile is accomplished.
• February 17 – Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, is launched to measure cloud cover for the United States Navy.
• June 25 – A KH-1 Corona satellite, believed to be the first operational spy satellite, is launched as science mission "Discoverer 4" from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, aboard a Thor-Agena rocket.
• August 7 – The United States launches Explorer 6 from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral.
• 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.
• 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.

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.

Chemistry

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

Computer science

• October – Martin Gardner presents the Three Prisoners problem in probability theory.
• December – The specification for the programming language COBOL is completed.
• IBM ship the transistor-based IBM 1401 mainframe.
• Edsger W. Dijkstra rediscovers 'Prim's algorithm'.

History of science

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

Mathematics

• Kenkichi Iwasawa initiates Iwasawa theory.

Medicine

• July – The medical research group studying Minamata disease comes to the conclusion that mercury is the cause.
• Joseph Murray performs the world's first successful allotransplantation.
• 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.
• First known case of human HIV, in the Belgian Congo.

Physics

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

Technology

• June 9 – The USS George Washington is launched at Groton, Connecticut, as the first submarine to carry ballistic missiles (December 30 – commissioned).
• 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.
• Pilkington Brothers patent the float glass process invented by Alastair Pilkington.

Events

• May 7 – English 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

• March 9 – Takaaki Kajita, Japanese nuclear physicist (Nobel Prize in Physics 2015).
• 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

• January 21 – Frances Gertrude McGill (born 1877), Canadian forensic pathologist.
• 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.