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

Contents 1 Astronomy and space exploration 2 Biology 3 Computer science 4 Physics 5 Technology 6 Awards 7 Births 8 Deaths 9 Organisations

[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 2 sends back first photos of the far side of Earth's Moon.
• September 19 - Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison publish in Nature their seminal paper Searching for Interstellar Communications, establishing the scientific rationale for SETI.
• Physicist Freeman Dyson first proposes the hypothetical Dyson sphere.
• Little Joe 2, a mission in the Mercury program, carried Sam the monkey into space.

[edit] Biology

• January 1 - Cultivars of plants named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin.
• July - The medical research group studying Minamata disease comes to the conclusion that mercury is the cause. [1]

[edit] Computer science

• IBM shipped the transistor-based IBM 1401 mainframe.

[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.
• Pilkington Brothers patent the float glass process.

[edit] Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Emilio Gino Segrè, - Owen Chamberlain
  • Chemistry - Jaroslav Heyrovský
  • Medicine - Severo Ochoa, Arthur Kornberg

[edit] Births

• August 3 - Koichi Tanaka, Japanese chemist Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002
• December 25 - Michael P. Anderson (d. 2003), American astronaut.

[edit] Deaths

• February 15 - Owen Willans Richardson (b. 1879), British physicist, Nobel Prize for Physics 1928
• June 9 - Adolf Windaus (b. 1876) German chemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1928

[edit] Organisations

• Austria joins CERN.