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February 1963

Month of 1963 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

February 1963

The following events occurred in February 1963:

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February 21, 1963: Telstar becomes first satellite destroyed by radiation
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February 5, 1963: Canada's Prime Minister Diefenbaker loses vote of confidence
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February 14, 1963: Syncom 1 becomes the first geosynchronous satellite, but is damaged beyond repair

February 1, 1963 (Friday)

February 2, 1963 (Saturday)

February 3, 1963 (Sunday)

  • Elections were held in Nicaragua for the President, the 42-member Chamber of Deputies, and the 16 member Senate. Evidence of massive impending fraud caused the Traditional Conservative Party, led by Fernando Agüero Rocha, to abandon its loyalist stance and to call for a boycott of the 1963 elections.[12][13] René Schick Gutiérrez of the Nationalist Liberal Party, considered a puppet of Luis Somoza and the Somoza family that had ruled since 1932, officially won 90 percent of the vote over the Conservatives Diego Manuel Chamorro. Somoza's party also won two-thirds of the seats in the Chamber and 75% of the Senate seats.
  • On orders from Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Operation Coldstore was carried out in Singapore, with the arrest of more than 150 journalists, labor and student leaders, and members of political parties that opposed Lee's People's Action Party (PAP). The detainees were kept at the Outram Road Prison for three months; with the leaders of the Barisan Sosialis and other parties forced out of campaigning, the PAP would capture 2⁄3rds of the seats in the parliamentary elections, and maintain control thereafter.[14]
  • Canadian Minister of National Defence Douglas Harkness resigned in disagreement over the nuclear policies of Prime Minister Diefenbaker, triggering the collapse of the rest of the ministry.[15]

February 4, 1963 (Monday)

  • The SS Marine Sulphur Queen, a tanker with a crew of 39 and a cargo of molten sulphur, was heard from for the last time, two days after its departure from Beaumont, Texas, en route to Norfolk, Virginia. Contact between the ship and its owner, Marine Transport Lines, Inc., was lost and the ship was reported missing two days later.[16] Debris from the tanker washed ashore in Florida, but a search by U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy airplanes did not locate the ship.[17] The story of the disappearance of the tanker would first be described as a casualty of the "Bermuda Triangle" in the Argosy magazine article (by Vincent Gaddis in its February 1964 issue) "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle", although an investigating panel concluded that the ship, structurally unsound and burdened by its heavy cargo, broke in half during a storm.[18]
  • The UK Football Association decided to postpone the fifth and sixth rounds of the 1962–63 FA Cup because of delays caused by the severe winter.[19]

February 5, 1963 (Tuesday)

February 6, 1963 (Wednesday)

February 7, 1963 (Thursday)

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Proposed deployment sequence for Gemini ballute stabilization device
  • The first test of the "ballute" system for the Gemini ejection seat was conducted at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station, using two dummies. The ballute (a portmanteau for "balloon" and "parachute") was a device to stabilize the astronaut after ejection at high altitude. In the first test, the ballute failed to inflate or release properly on either dummy. After redesign, five consecutive dummy drops in March succeeded.[22]

February 8, 1963 (Friday)

February 9, 1963 (Saturday)

February 10, 1963 (Sunday)

February 11, 1963 (Monday)

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Julia Child[39]

February 12, 1963 (Tuesday)

February 13, 1963 (Wednesday)

  • Residents of the Rwenzori Mountains in the Toro Kingdom region of southwestern Uganda rebelled against the government and declared independence of a state they called the Republic of Ruwenzuru. The Toro independence movement would be defeated in 1970, and a majority of the secessionist leaders would be murdered in 1972.[51]
  • A 7.3 magnitude earthquake occurred off the coast of Taiwan, near Su-ao, Yilan County.[52] Despite its magnitude, the earthquake killed only three people. The dead were highway workers near Taichung who were buried in an avalanche triggered by the tremor.[53]

February 14, 1963 (Thursday)

February 15, 1963 (Friday)

  • Television was introduced in Singapore, with one hour per week of programming initially, increasing by April to five hours of programming each weeknight, and 10 hours each on Saturday and Sunday.[62]
  • The Leonard's M&O Subway (later the Tandy Center Subway), the only privately owned subway in the United States, opened in Fort Worth, Texas.[63] It would cease operations in 2002.
  • The Dutch liner Maasdam struck the wreckage of SS Harborough at Bremen, West Germany, and was holed. All 230 passengers and 276 crew were rescued by the German ship SS Gotthilf Hagen. The Maasdam had been three days away from inaugurating direct service between West Germany and the United States.[64][65]
  • Agena target vehicle plans were presented to the Gemini Project Office, with tests of the target docking adapter to take place at Merritt Island radar tower.[22]

February 16, 1963 (Saturday)

February 17, 1963 (Sunday)

February 18, 1963 (Monday)

  • Mount Agung, a dormant volcano on the Indonesian island of Bali, became active again for the first time in 120 years. Its lava flow would destroy villages in the vicinity and kill more than 1,000 people.[74][75]
  • Born: Udin (Fuad Muhammad Syafruddin), Indonesian journalist who was murdered in 1996. The date of his birth was considered unlucky in the Javanese calendar as it fell on a kliwon Monday.[76]

February 19, 1963 (Tuesday)

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Friedan

February 20, 1963 (Wednesday)

February 21, 1963 (Thursday)

  • The Communist government of East Berlin yielded to public protests and reversed a decision to assign graduating students to specific occupations and prohibit them from applying for other lines of work. A week earlier, high schools had been sent "lists containing the name of each pupil and the job that the state authorities had picked for him or her" as part of the national requirement of one year of manual labor prior to being able to attend a university. Teachers, students and parents had sent letters of criticism. Neues Deutschland, the official newspaper of East Germany's ruling communist organization, the Socialist Unity Party, announced the rescission of the order and criticized it as "bureaucratic, narrow-minded and schematic".[86]
  • Telstar 1, the first privately financed satellite, became the first satellite to be destroyed by radiation. Telstar had been launched from the United States eight months earlier on July 10, 1962, one day after the U.S. had conducted a high altitude nuclear test, and the increased concentration of electrons in the Van Allen radiation belt had caused the communication satellite's transponders to deteriorate.[87]
  • A 5.3 magnitude earthquake destroyed the city of Al Maraj, Libya. The quake lasted for 15 seconds, collapsed 70 percent of the town's buildings, killed more than 300 people, and left 12,000 homeless.[88][89]
  • The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party sent a formal letter to the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, proposing a summit between the two in order to settle their differences. China would respond favorably on March 9.[90]
  • Gordon Cooper and Alan Shepard, pilot and backup pilot, respectively, for May's Mercury 9 mission, received a one-day briefing on all experiments approved for the flight, and all hardware and operational procedures to handle the experiments were established.[4]
  • Klein's Sporting Goods of Chicago received a shipment of Mannlicher–Carcano rifles from Crescent Firearms Company of New York, including rifle #C2766, which would be used to kill John F. Kennedy.[91]
  • Born: William Baldwin, American actor and the third oldest of the four Baldwin brothers; near Massapequa, New York[92]

February 22, 1963 (Friday)

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The Medal
  • Executive Order 11085 from U.S. President Kennedy established the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for the stated purpose of honoring "any person who has made an especially meritorious contribution" in one of three categories, "the security or national interests of the United States", "world peace", or "cultural or other significant public or private endeavors".
  • China and Pakistan signed an agreement to settle the 280-mile (450 km) long border between China's Xinjiang region and Pakistan's Gilgit–Baltistan area, with China relinquishing 775 square miles (2,010 km2) to Pakistan.[93]
  • The fictional cartoon character Pebbles Flintstone was "born" in an episode of the cartoon The Flintstones called "The Blessed Event".[94]
  • Born: Devon Malcolm, Jamaican-English cricketer; in Kingston

February 23, 1963 (Saturday)

February 24, 1963 (Sunday)

February 25, 1963 (Monday)

  • The sinking of the Japanese ferry Tokiwa Maru killed 47 of the 66 people on board, 10 minutes after the ferry collided with a much larger Japanese cargo ship, Richmond Maru off Kobe. The Tokiwa Maru disaster was one of four fatal ship accidents in a 24-hour period. In the other accidents, The Greek ore carrier SS Aegli capsized in a storm and sank in the Aegean Sea with the loss of 18 of her 22 crew; the four survivors were able to swim to nearby islands. An unidentified Japanese fishing boat and its 11 crew sank in a storm in the East China Sea, and four persons on the Italian oil tanker Miraflores were killed in a fiery collision on the Scheldt River with the British tanker Abadesa.[103][104]
  • "Please Please Me", The Beatles' first single to be sold in the United States, was released by Vee-Jay Records. Only 7,310 copies of the record were bought.[105][106]
  • Born

February 26, 1963 (Tuesday)

  • Armenian-born U.S. inventor Luther Simjian received a patent for his invention of the "Bankograph", a depository machine for receiving and accurately recording (using optical character recognition) deposits of checks, currency and coins and providing a receipt for the customer. U.S. Patent 3,079,603 had been applied for on June 30, 1963. Although the Bankograph, which had been tested by the City Bank of New York while the patent was pending, did not come into widespread use, some of Simjian's optical recognition technology would be incorporated for automated banking.[109]
  • Gemini Project Office (GPO) decided that spacecraft separation of the spacecraft from the launch vehicle would be accomplished manually, and that no second-stage cutoff signal to the spacecraft would be required. GPO directed McDonnell to remove pertinent hardware from the spacecraft and Martin to recommend necessary hardware changes to the launch vehicle.[22]

February 27, 1963 (Wednesday)

February 28, 1963 (Thursday)

  • Chicago Alderman Benjamin F. Lewis of the 24th Ward, the first African-American to be elected to the Chicago City Council from the ward, was found murdered at his office in the 24th Ward's Democratic Party headquarters, two days after being overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term. Lewis had been handcuffed and then shot four times in the back of his head.[113][114] The murder was never solved.[115]
  • Dorothy Schiff resigned from the New York Newspaper Publisher's Association, saying that the city needed at least one paper operating during the newspaper strike. Her newspaper, the New York Post, would resume publication on March 4.[116]
  • American comedian Lenny Bruce was convicted by a jury in a Chicago municipal court on charges of obscenity arising from his profanity-laced performance at the Gate of Horn nightclub on December 5.[117]
  • The Gemini Project Office (GPO) reported that spacecraft No. 3 had been reassigned to the Gemini flight program.[22]
  • Died: Rajendra Prasad, 78, the first President of India, who served from 1950 to 1962[118]

References

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