Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

On 15 April 1955 Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald's franchise restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, the ninth McDonald's overall, a date the present McDonald's Corporation credits as its founding.

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.

On 17 January 1956 Ford sold 10.2 million shares at US$64.50 in an offering run by Goldman Sachs, with the Ford Foundation as the only seller, ending 53 years as a privately held company.

On 12 September 1958 Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby successfully tested the first working integrated circuit, a phase-shift oscillator on a sliver of germanium with its components linked by wires.

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.

The first Grammy Awards were held on 4 May 1959 at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, with a simultaneous event in New York; Domenico Modugno's "Volare" won Record and Song of the Year and Henry Mancini's The Music From Peter Gunn won Album of the Year.

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.

On 1 May 1962 the Dayton Company opened the first Target discount store, a 68,800-square-foot, one-floor store at 1515 County Road B in Roseville, Minnesota.

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.

The hazelnut and cocoa spread that grew out of Pietro Ferrero's post-war Giandujot is first jarred as Nutella at Ferrero's plant in Alba on 20 April 1964.

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.

The 7th Grammy Awards on 13 April 1965 gave the Beatles Best New Artist; Getz/Gilberto won Album of the Year, "The Girl From Ipanema" Record of the Year and "Hello, Dolly!" Song of the Year.

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.

Swiss inventor Ernst Menzi's company launched the Menzi Muck 2500 in 1966, the world's first all-terrain walking (spider) excavator, built to work steep Alpine slopes conventional machines could not reach.

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.

Boeing finished construction of its Everett, Washington factory in 1967 to build the 747, creating what is still the world's largest building by volume. Aerospace Manufacturing features the plant, which now also produces the 767, 777 and 787.

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 10th Grammy Awards on 29 February 1968 gave Album of the Year to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first rock album to win; the 5th Dimension's "Up, Up and Away" won Record and Song of the Year and Bobbie Gentry Best New Artist.

The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1968 American heist film directed by Norman Jewison and written by Alan R. Trustman. 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.

Joe, a teenage orphan in the slums of the Doya streets, meets Danpei, a homeless, alcoholic ex-boxing coach. Danpei, seeing Joe's boxing talent, decides to train him.

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.

Ted Codd's paper in Communications of the ACM proposes storing data as relations queried by predicate logic, independent of how it is laid out on disk. It is the founding document of the relational database and of SQL.

The deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded drove a storm surge over the low-lying islands of the Ganges Delta. At least 300,000 died, and the Pakistani government's response helped set off the Bangladesh Liberation War.

On 8 February 1971 the National Association of Securities Dealers launched Nasdaq, the first electronic stock market, at first a quotation system for over-the-counter securities.

The 13th Grammy Awards on 16 March 1971 at the Hollywood Palladium were the first broadcast live on television, on ABC with host Andy Williams; Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" won Record, Album and Song of the Year and the Carpenters Best New Artist.

The Magic Kingdom and its Florida resort opened to the public near Orlando, realizing Walt Disney's vision for a second, larger theme park.

Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in 1971 with the film producer Paul Aratow, in a house on Shattuck Avenue, and in doing so more or less founded what came to be called California cuisine: a short menu set by what the farms around the bay had that week rather than by a fixed carte. The block it stands on is now known as the Gourmet Ghetto.

VEB TAKRAF completed the first F60 lignite overburden conveyor bridge at the Welzow open-pit mine, creating what is still recognized as the largest mobile land machine ever built.

Richard Nixon spent 21 to 28 February 1972 in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai, meeting Mao Zedong on the day he arrived. No sitting US president had set foot in the People's Republic, and the two governments had had no diplomatic relations for 23 years.

At the end of Nixon's visit the two governments published a joint statement setting out, separately, what each believed about Taiwan. Washington said it 'acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China' — the sentence US policy has rested on ever since.

At the 14th Grammy Awards on 14 March 1972 at the Felt Forum in New York, Carole King won Record of the Year ("It's Too Late"), Album of the Year (Tapestry), Song of the Year ("You've Got a Friend") and Best Female Pop Vocal; Carly Simon won Best New Artist.

Magnavox released the Odyssey in the United States in September 1972, the first commercial home video game console, designed by Ralph Baer’s team at Sanders Associates. The Age of Mass Production cites it as the start of mass-produced video game hardware.

Tumut 3 became Australia's first major pumped-storage hydroelectric plant, eventually reaching 1,800 MW of generating capacity as part of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Three of its six units, fed by Talbingo Dam, can also pump water back uphill overnight at a combined 600 MW using cheap off-peak power.

Airbus’ first aircraft and the world’s first twin-engine wide-body airliner flew from Toulouse–Blagnac a month ahead of schedule, for one hour and 25 minutes, with Max Fischl as captain and Bernard Ziegler as first officer.

San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid welcomed its first tenant after overcoming years of public opposition to its unconventional tapered design.

Nobita Nobi is so hapless that his 22nd century descendants are still impoverished as a result of his 20th century bumbling.

Fischer Black and Myron Scholes give a closed-form price for a European option in the Journal of Political Economy, in the same year the Chicago Board Options Exchange opens. The formula becomes the language of the derivatives market.

Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the Sydney Opera House, capping fourteen years of construction that ran a decade late and far over its original budget.

The Exorcist is a 1973 American supernatural horror film directed by William Friedkin and produced by William Peter Blatty, who adapted his own 1971 novel. The film stars Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, and Linda Blair, and follows the demonic possession of a young girl and the attempt to rescue her through an exorcism by two Catholic priests.

Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience completed its hangar-sized Large-Scale Rainfall Simulator in Tsukuba, letting scientists recreate extreme storms on demand to study landslides and flooding.