February 1959

• American singers J.P. Richardson, 28, "
  Roger Peterson. Waylon Jennings had given his seat to Richardson, and Valens and Holly's guitarist Tommy Allsup had flipped a coin to see who would get the other seat on the plane.^[11] The plane, a Beechcraft Bonanza, took off at 12:50 a.m. and crashed minutes later on the farm of Delbert Juhl, killing all four persons on board.^[12][13] This became popularly known as "The Day the Music Died
  ".
• La Guardia Airport, killing 65 of the 73 persons on board.^[14]
• Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King and Lawrence D. Reddick departed from Idlewild Airport New York for a tour of the Middle East and India.^[15]
• Died: Vincent Astor, 67, American philanthropist who inherited a fortune after the death of his father on the RMS Titanic in 1912, then donated most of it to various charities.

February 4, 1959 (Wednesday)

• In
  Nikolay Shtelbaums broke the world record for the 10,000 meter skate, set by Hjalmar Andersen
  in 1952. Shtelbaums completed the 10K skate in 16 minutes, 31.4 seconds, besting the Andersen's 1952 mark by 1.2 seconds.
• Born: Lawrence Taylor, American NFL linebacker for the New York Giants from 1981 to 1998, inductee to the Pro Football Hall of Fame; in Williamsburg, Virginia^[16]
• Died: Una O'Connor, 78, Irish actress

February 5, 1959 (Thursday)

• The
  Nikita S. Khrushchev invited U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to visit Moscow, adding that he could bring anyone, and go anywhere, he chose. In his speech, Khrushchev referred to the Secretary of State and said, "Mr. Dulles, if you so desire, then for the sake of ending the Cold War, we are even prepared to admit your victory in this war that is unwanted by the peoples. Regard yourselves, gentlemen, as victors in this war, but end it quickly."^[17]
• The
  Airman Basic.^[18]

• Jack Kilby, working for Texas Instruments, filed for a patent for the first integrated circuit, which was granted as U.S. Patent 3,138,743 on June 23, 1964.^[19] Kilby had recorded his inspiration on July 24, 1958, writing "The following circuit elements could be made on single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor" and put these on a silicon wafer.^[20]
• Following industry-wide competition, a formal contract for research and development of the
  NACA presentation in mid-March 1958.^[3]
• Born: Ken Nelson, English record producer; in Liverpool

February 7, 1959 (Saturday)

• Former SS Colonel Sepp Dietrich was released from prison in Munich after serving half of a sentence for assisting in the execution of high-ranking German officers in 1934.^[21]

• After spending a record 64 days, 22 hours and 21 minutes aloft, two fliers landed their Cessna 172 in Las Vegas. Pilot John Cook and businessman Bob Timm had taken off on December 4, 1958, and on January 23, had broken the previous record of 50 days. They refueled twice each day at Blythe, California, from a truck that would drive 90 miles per hour (140 km/h) beneath the plane.^[22]
• At the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the medical tests for the Mercury astronaut selection began.^[3]
• Died:
  Daniel F. Malan, 84, Prime Minister of South Africa
  to 1948 to 1954 and architect of apartheid

• In the British
  Federation of Arab Emirates of the South, a political federation of the emirates of Beihan and Audhali; the sultanates of Dhala, Fadhli, and Yafi as-Sufla; and the sheikdom of al-Awalaq al-Ulya, a move that enraged Yemeni nationalists who claimed Aden as part of Yemen.^[23]
• Died: William J. Donovan, 76, Director of the United States Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, and one of the persons who helped organized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked, "What a man! We have lost the last hero!"^[24] A retired Army Major General, Donovan was the first person to be awarded the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal.^[25]

February 9, 1959 (Monday)

• The first
  ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka missile, became operational at Plesetsk
  in the Soviet Union. The missile, capable of hitting targets at a range of 12,000 kilometres (7,500 mi) was first tested on December 15, 1959.

• At 2:20 a.m. CST, a tornado in St. Louis killed 21 people and injured hundreds. The twister flattened a neighborhood two blocks from Busch Stadium I.^[26]
• Lewis Research Centers.^[3]

• Meeting in
  two agreements concerning the upcoming independence from the United Kingdom of the island of Cyprus, which had large populations of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The two nations, after consulting with the leaders of their respective ethnic communities on Cyprus, agreed to a constitution that would provide for both groups to be represented in the Cypriot government, and temporarily abandoned their conflicting demands. Greece refrained from pursuing enosis, the incorporation of the entire island as Grecian territory, and Turkey refrained from pursuing a partition of the island between the Turks in the north and the Greeks in the south. The two sides would sign a second agreement, the Treaty of Guarantee, with the United Kingdom in London on February 19.^[27]
• The Royal Air Force made its first public launch of one of its 60 Thor missiles, at a press conference at RAF Feltwell base. The intermediate range missiles had a range of 1,600 miles (2,600 km).^[28]
• Mercury-Jupiter configuration.^[3]
• After five seasons of being officially known as the
  UPI pointed out that "virtually every piece of publicity from the club spoke of the team as the 'Redlegs' since 1953."^[29]
• Died: Marshall Teague, 36, American race car driver, was killed in an accident at the Daytona Speedway, 11 days before the start of the first Daytona 500.^[30][31]

February 12, 1959 (Thursday)

• The new version of the Lincoln cent was introduced on Abraham Lincoln's 150th birthday. While the portrait of Lincoln was unchanged, the tails side had the Lincoln Memorial replacing the "wheat penny".
• The last B-36 bomber was decommissioned.

February 13, 1959 (Friday)

• Jose Miro Cardona as Prime Minister of Cuba.^[32]

• The
  global warming was unknown, but added, "One theory is that the change is man-made, that a blanket of carbon dioxide given off by the burning of coal and oil retards the radiation of heat by the earth."^[33]
• Born: Renée Fleming, American soprano; in Indiana, Pennsylvania
• Died: Warren "Baby" Dodds, 60, American jazz musician

February 15, 1959 (Sunday)

• In
  Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes acted to put down an Indian uprising that had been organized by his opponent Raul Estuardo Lorenzana. Ydigoras would later write in his 1963 autobiography My War with Communism that the rebellion was the first of several Communist Cuban plots against his government.^[34]
• Police in New York City concluded what was, at the time, the second-largest drug bust in American history, arresting 27 people between 8:30 Saturday night and 5:00 Sunday morning, and seizing 32 pounds (15 kg) of heroin with a "street value of $3,660,800". A January 1958 roundup in Elmont, New York, had netted 35 pounds (16 kg) and 17 arrests.[35]
• The medical examinations at the Wright Air Development Center for the final selection of the Mercury astronauts began.^[3]
• Nine people in a single car were killed when their vehicle was hit head-on by another vehicle on
  United States Highway 281 south of Alamo, Texas. The driver of the other vehicle, whose speedometer was frozen at 80 miles per hour (130 km/h) after the collision, also died.^[36]
• Died:
  Richardson's law.^[37]

• The French ocean liner SS Île de France was retired, sailing from Le Havre to Japan for use as scrap metal.
• Born: John McEnroe, American tennis player who won the U.S. Open championship four times (1979, 1980, 1981, 1984) and the Wimbledon championships three times (1981, 1983, 1984); at the U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, West Germany^[38]

February 17, 1959 (Tuesday)

• Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, was launched at 10:55 a.m. from Cape Canaveral to measure cloud cover for the United States Navy.^[39]
• The first formal meeting of the Navy-NASA Committee on Project Mercury search and recovery operations was held. They decided that joint recovery exercises would be initiated as soon as possible. The committee members determined that the Navy, particularly the
  Atlantic Missile Range, using the selected Project Mercury vehicles; and that naval units could support operations in the escape area between Cape Canaveral and Bermuda.^[3]
• Gatwick Airport. Menderes was scheduled to meet with Prime Ministers Macmillan of Britain and Karamanlis of Greece for an agreement concerning the island of Cyprus.^[40]
  Menderes survived the crash but was deposed the following year and executed on September 17, 1961.

• Elections were held in Nepal for the first time in its history, as voters chose candidates for 18 of the 109 lower house seats, with the remainder to be chosen on eight other days.^[41]

February 19, 1959 (Thursday)

• The National Assembly Building of Slovenia, designed by Vinko Glanz, was opened in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, nearly five years after construction had started in 1954. A session of the Slovenian People's Assembly followed the ceremonies.^[42]
• In London, representatives of Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom signed the Treaty of Guarantee, the second of
  two agreements regarding Cyprus, with all three nations being granted the right to intervene militarily, if necessary, to protect members of one ethnic community from the other, or to uphold the jointly-accepted constitution.^[27]
• In a speech, Dr. T. Keith Glennan estimated that Project Mercury would cost over $200 million. Glennan said the cost was high because a new area of technology was being explored with no precedents or experience from which to draw, and because the world-wide tracking network construction was a tremendous undertaking.^[3]
• Eddie Fisher. "My husband became interested in another woman", she testified in a Los Angeles hearing. Reports added that she did so "never mentioning the name of Elizabeth Taylor".^[43]
• Died: Daniel A. Reed, 83, U.S. Congressman for New York since 1919, and former football coach at the University of Cincinnati (1899–1911)^[44]

February 20, 1959 (Friday)

• At the Mkariba hydroelectric dam at Rhodesia, 17 men were killed when the platform they were on collapsed, sending them falling 200 feet (61 m) down a shaft.^[45]
• Canada cancelled the
  Avro Arrow
  program.
• Responsibility for planning and contracting for Project Mercury tracking facilities was formally assigned to the Langley Research Center.^[3]
• In testimony before the
  interplanetary flight.^[46]

• The Douglas DC-8 30 Series, a longer-range version of the DC-8 passenger jet, made its first flight.^[47]
• The New Yorker published "On the Sidewalk", John Updike's parody of On the Road.^[48]
• The Ben Hecht Show, a live television program on New York's WABC-TV, was cancelled permanently after Hecht's guest, surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, used the word "orgasm" in an interview. Ben Hecht, a screenwriter whom Mike Wallace described as "a trifle profane" on the air, had already been in trouble with the station. Wallace would later describe the episode as "the 'Orgasm and Out!' show".^[49]

February 22, 1959 (Sunday)

• The very first Daytona 500, now NASCAR's preeminent stock car racing event, was held at Daytona Beach, Florida, with Johnny Beauchamp and Lee Petty crossing the finish line within fractions of a second of each other, and both faster than the existing NASCAR speed record. "NASCAR officials stationed at the finish line first gave Beauchamp the nod by 12 inches," one sportswriter would write the next day, but added "Petty insisted he had Beauchamp by two feet."^[50] Although the race took 3 hours and 41 minutes to complete, it would take three days for the race to be won, and only after NASCAR officials reviewed photographic evidence.

• It was reported that the United States might put a man into space as early as February 26, 1959, with
  Neil A. Armstrong. The X-15 would be tested by Crossfield in March, but would not be launched into space.^[51]
• Born: Kyle MacLachlan, American actor known for the TV show Twin Peaks; in Yakima, Washington

February 23, 1959 (Monday)

• On his 91st birthday,
  Chen Yi. The day before, the African-American author had been given an official state reception by China's Prime Minister Zhou Enlai.^[52]
• Died: Luis Palés Matos, 60, Puerto Rican poet

February 24, 1959 (Tuesday)

• In
  San Luis, Mexico, seven children were killed, and 23 people injured, when a packed grandstand collapsed during a school festival.^[53]

• Three days after the race had been held, Lee Petty was declared the official winner of the first Daytona 500 and the man initially ruled to have crossed the finish line first, Johnny Beauchamp, a close second. Bill France, the president of NASCAR, announced the decision at a press conference in Daytona Beach, Florida, and said that films and photos taken at the finish line had shown that Petty crossed the line ahead of Beauchamp.^[54]
• deuterium oxide, also known as "heavy water", a key step in Israel's atomic program.^[55]

• In Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, Prime Minister Edgar Whitehead declared a state of emergency and ordered the arrest of more than 500 suspected members of the African National Congress.^[56]
• The Navy destroyer USS Roy O. Hale intercepted and boarded a Russian fishing trawler off Newfoundland, "to check whether it was responsible for damage five days earlier to five transatlantic cables". The Novorossisk, with a crew of 54, was released after a five-man team conducted an inspection.^[57]
• Born:
  Panama City
• Died:
  • Edward VII of the United Kingdom
  • René Belbenoît, 59, who wrote the book Dry Guillotine after his escape from Devil's Island in 1935, died of cardiac arrest at his home in the United States.^[58]

February 27, 1959 (Friday)

• The wreckage of the American B-24 bomber
  second season of The Twilight Zone.^[60]
• In Boston, the
  Lakers (at that time a Minneapolis team) 173 to 139 for the highest score by a team in a regulation NBA game; and, at the time, the highest ever for a losing team. NBA President Maurice Podoloff said that he would ask officials of both teams whether the players were faithfully defending, or just "goofing off".^[61]
  The record was tied on November 10, 1990, by Phoenix Suns (173–145 vs. Denver) for highest number of points in a regulation game. The record, set in overtime on December 13, 1983, is Detroit 186, Denver 184.