Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

BOAC’s G-ALYP took off from London for Johannesburg with fare-paying passengers, the first scheduled jetliner service in the world. Comet flights were about twice as fast as advanced piston airliners and cut London–Johannesburg to 21 hours 20 minutes.

Nature carries Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, the paper in which Francis Crick and James Watson describe the double helix. It runs to two pages and settles how genetic instructions are held and passed on.

A unanimous US Supreme Court held that state laws establishing separate public schools for Black and white children violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment - "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" - partially overruling Plessy v. Ferguson and its separate-but-equal doctrine.

France's SNCF pushed two modified electric locomotives to a then-world rail speed record of 331 km/h (206 mph) on a test track near Facture on March 28-29, 1955. An Infrastructural Game Changer cites the run as the moment fast trains overtook cars and planes.

At Ann Arbor, Thomas Francis Jr announced the results of the largest medical field trial ever run - 1.8 million children - and pronounced Jonas Salk's polio vaccine safe, effective and potent. Church bells rang across the United States; within two years American cases had fallen by almost 90 per cent.

Walt Disney's $17 million theme park, built on former orange groves in Anaheim after a chaotic construction rush, opened to press and invited guests as Disneyland.

Yang Bing-yi founded Din Tai Fung in Taipei in 1958, first as a cooking-oil retailer and then as a dumpling house when the oil business failed. Its xiaolongbao, pleated to a standard count of folds, turned a single shop on Xinyi Road into a chain across Asia and the United States.

H.J. Heinz opens its Kitt Green factory near Wigan, which grows into the company's largest food processing plant in the world and Europe's biggest.

Harry Barberian opened his steak house on Elm Street in 1959, in a row of Victorian houses behind Yonge Street, and it has outlasted most of what grew up around it - a dark room of oil paintings and charcoal-grilled beef with one of the deepest wine cellars in Canada dug out beneath it.

A magnitude 9.5 megathrust rupture off southern Chile shook for ten minutes — the strongest earthquake ever instrumentally recorded. Its tsunami crossed the Pacific and struck Hilo, Hawaii, with waves 10.7 m high.

In 1961 General Motors installed the Unimate, the world's first industrial robot, at its New Jersey factory to lift and stack hot die-cast metal parts. Industry 4.0 opens its history of factory automation with this machine.

Sam Walton opened Wal-Mart Discount City on Rogers' Highway 71, his first store under the name after a decade running Ben Franklin variety stores. The format was the bet: lower margins on everything, in towns the big chains had written off as too small.

On October 1, 1964, just nine days before the Tokyo Olympics opened, Japan's Tokaido Shinkansen began carrying passengers between Tokyo and Osaka at over 200 km/h.

The Houston Astrodome, the world's first fixed-roof, air-conditioned multipurpose stadium, opened on 9 April 1965 with an exhibition game between the Astros and Yankees — though it's stood closed and searching for a new use since 2008.

Gordon Moore's four-page article in Electronics observes that the number of components per chip has been doubling yearly and projects it forward a decade. The observation becomes Moore's law and the semiconductor industry's roadmap.

Mercedes-Benz's Wörth am Rhein plant, which had assembled only truck cabs since opening in 1963, produced its first complete vehicle, a green LP 608, on 14 July 1965. The plant has since grown into the world's largest truck factory, building models including the Actros.

London's cylindrical BT Tower (originally the GPO Tower) began carrying live microwave telecommunications traffic in 1965, its concrete core partly designed to survive a nuclear blast.

Opel opened its Dudenhofen proving ground near Frankfurt in April 1966, the most modern car test center in Europe at the time. Six decades on, its more than 70 kilometers of track still put prototype technologies like automated driving through secretive testing before they reach the road.

BMW's newly built assembly line at its Berlin-Spandau plant produces its first complete motorcycle, an R 60/2 with a swinging-fork chassis, kicking off the relocation of BMW motorcycle manufacturing from Munich to Berlin.

The US Army shut down Camp Century, its secret nuclear-powered base carved into the Greenland ice sheet to conceal a mobile missile network under Project Iceworm, after the tunnels it depended on began collapsing.

Moshe Safdie's modular housing experiment, conceived as his student thesis, opened to the public as a pavilion of Montreal's 1967 World's Fair.

The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1968 American heist film directed by Norman Jewison and written by Alan R. Starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, and Jack Weston, the film follows Vicki Anderson (Dunaway), who is hired to investigate the culprits of a multi-million dollar bank heist orchestrated by Thomas Crown (McQueen).

The first Jumbo Jet flew from Paine Field with test pilots Jack Waddell and Brien Wygle at the controls. Despite a minor flap problem the flight confirmed the 747 handled well and was largely immune to the Dutch roll that had plagued early swept-wing jets.

The Anglo-French supersonic airliner, built by Sud Aviation and the British Aircraft Corporation under a 1962 treaty, flew for the first time from Toulouse. Four Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 turbojets drove an ogival delta wing carrying 92 to 128 passengers.

A magnitude 7.9 earthquake off the Peruvian coast shook loose part of Mount Huascaran, and the debris avalanche buried the town of Yungay. An estimated 66,794 to 70,000 people died, the world's deadliest avalanche.