RETURN TO INDEX
Top Song(s)
• Bobby Darin - Mack the Knife
• The Platters - Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
• Johnny Horton - Battle of New Orleans
• Frankie Avalon - Venus
• Paul Anka - Lonely Boy
Top Film(s)
• North by Northwest
• The 400 Blows
• Anatomy of a Murder
• Rio Bravo
• Some Like It Hot
Best Selling Book(s)
• Cat Among the Pigeons - Agatha Christie
• A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry
• The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
• Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
• To Sir, With Love - E.R. Braithwaite
Famous Deaths
• January 14 - G. D. H. Cole, English political theorist, economist and historian
• February 7 – D. F. Malan, South African politician, 4th Prime Minister of South Africa
• March 7 – Ichiro Hatoyama, Japanese politician, 36th Prime Minister of Japan
• April 8 – Jonathan Zenneck, German physicist and electrical engineer
May 5 - Carlos Saavedra Lamas, Argentine politician, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
• June 9 – Adolf Windaus, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• July 25 - Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, Polish-born Chief Rabbi of Ireland, and later of Israel
• September 7 – Maurice Duplessis, Premier of Quebec
• October 16 – George C. Marshall, United States Secretary of State
• November 15 – Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Scottish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
Medical/Science/Technology
• At Cape Canaveral, Florida, the first successful test firing of a Titan ICBM accomplished.
• Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, is launched to measure cloud cover for the United States Navy.
• NASA announces its selection of seven military pilots to become the first United States astronauts.
• Cultivars of plants named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin.
• The Caspian tiger becomes extinct in Iran.
• The specification for the programming language COBOL is completed.
• IBM ship the transistor-based IBM 1401 mainframe.
• 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.
• First known case of human HIV, in the Belgian Congo.
Political
• January 3 — Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. state.
• January 7 — The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
• January 22 - USAF concludes that less than 1% of UFOs are unknown objects.
• March 18 — U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a bill allowing for Hawaiian statehood.
• April 9 — NASA announces its selection of the seven military pilots to become the first U.S. astronauts.
• June 3 - 1st US Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
• June 8 — USS Barbero and the United States Postal Service attempt the delivery of mail via Missile Mail.
• May 25 - US Supreme Court rules Louisiana prohibiting black-white boxing unconstitutional.
• June 26 - Queen Elizabeth II (as monarch of Canada) and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower open the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
• December 1 — Antarctic Treaty — 12 countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union, sign a landmark treaty.
National
• January 22 — Knox Mine Disaster: near Pittston City in Port Griffith, Pennsylvania; 12 miners are killed.
• February 6 — At Cape Canaveral, Florida, the first successful test firing of a Titan missile is accomplished.
• February 13 — TAT-2, AT&T's second transatlantic telephone cable, goes into operation.
• May 8 — The first Little Caesars pizza restaurant is opened in Garden City, Michigan.
• June 9 — The USS George Washington is launched as the first submarine to carry ballistic missiles.
• July 15 — Steel strike of 1959: Labor union strike in the U.S. steel industry.
• August 17 - The 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake in southwest Montana kills 28.
• September 16 — The Xerox 914, the first plain paper copier, is introduced to the public.
• October 2 — Rod Serling's classic anthology series The Twilight Zone premieres on CBS.
• November 18 — MGM's widescreen, multimillion-dollar, Technicolor version of Ben-Hur, is released.
Worldwide
• January 8 – Charles de Gaulle is inaugurated as the first president of the French Fifth Republic.
• January 15 – The Soviet Union conducts its first census after World War II.
• February 16 – Fidel Castro becomes Premier of Cuba.
• March 31 – The Dalai Lama is granted asylum in India.
• May 24 – British Empire Day is renamed Commonwealth Day.
• June 3 - Singapore becomes a self-governing crown colony of Britain with Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Minister.
• July 25 – The SR.N1 hovercraft crosses the English Channel from Calais to Dover in just over 2 hours.
• August 19 – The Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) is established.
• September 14 – Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 becomes the first human-made object to crash on the Moon.
• December 11 – Charles Robberts Swart is appointed the 11th Governor-General of the Union of South Africa.