February 1958

February 1, 1958 (Saturday)

• King Mahendra of Nepal announced plans for free elections to take place in 1959 and the establishment of a democratic constitution.
• Egypt and Syria announced the formation of the United Arab Republic, as President Quwatli of Syria signed a pact with Egypt's President Nasser at the Koubba Palace in Cairo.
• Domenico Modugno, paired with Johnny Dorelli, won the 8. Sanremo Festival with "Volare", composed by Modugno; Nilla Pizzi was runner-up with "L'edera". Modugno's resounding and unexpected success marked a turning point for the Italian song, until then bound to the traditional melodic formulas.
• Canada's Governor General, Viscount Massey, dissolved parliament at the request of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, and scheduled elections for the Canadian House of Commons for March 31.
• Forty-seven people were killed in the collision of a U.S. Air Force C-118A transport plane with 41 people on board, and a U.S. Navy P2V Neptune patrol plane with a crew of seven. The planes collided over the Los Angeles suburb of Norwalk, California. The C-118 plane crashed into the parking lot of the Norwalk Sheriff's Department at the intersection of Firestone Boulevard and Pioneer Boulevard, and there were no survivors. Two men survived the crash of the P2V, which came down in a vacant area at the Santa Fe Springs Fire Station. A woman in Norwalk was killed from the C-118 crash site as she stepped outside of her home to see what had happened, and "was cut in half by a flying fragment".
• Died: Clinton Davisson, 76, American physicist and 1937 Nobel Prize laureate known for his discovery of electron diffraction in the Davisson–Germer experiment

  February 2, 1958 (Sunday)

• Mario Echandi Jiménez was elected as President of Costa Rica, defeating Francisco Orlich Bolmarcich in a close race.
• The word "aerospace", originally spelled "aero-space", was coined by the staff of the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, as part of an "interim glossary" that was to be used for jargon in the U.S. Air Force. The term, referring to the atmosphere and outer space as one unit, was derived from "aero-", a Greek suffix for air, and "space", from Latin "spatium", an extension into the beyond.
• Born: Paolo De Castro, Italian professor and politician, in San Pietro in Vernotico
• Died: Bertrand Snell, 87, U.S. Congressman for New York and House Minority Leader from 1931 to 1938

  February 3, 1958 (Monday)

• Nikolai Bulganin's letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the third in eight weeks and containing a nine-point agenda for a summit, was made public.
• Died: Wilfred Fienburgh, 38, English TV and print journalist, and member of the British House of Commons, died from injuries sustained two days earlier when he lost control of his car and crashed into a lamppost in London. In December, he had written to a newspaper, in his lifetime he had "been run over by a taxi and knocked down by a pram," and that "In cars and jeeps I have hit a tree, a railway bridge, my own garden fence, three other cars, a four-ton RAF lorry, a policeman and the side of a battle cruiser. I must be, I think, accident prone."

  February 4, 1958 (Tuesday)

• The Marie Byrd Land Traverse Party discovered Mount Moore in Antarctica.
• An antitrust lawsuit against United Fruit Company by the U.S. Department of Justice ended after four years, as the company, which controlled the majority of "the world's marketable supply of bananas", agreed that it would create a competing company.
• Born: Tomasz Pacynski, Polish fantasy and science fiction author; in Warsaw
• Died: Filippo Andrea VI Doria Pamphili, 71, former Mayor of Rome

  February 5, 1958 (Wednesday)

• The Communist government arrested Chinese Jesuit and Roman Catholic bishop Dominic Tang in Guangzhou ; he would remain in jail for 22 years. Tang was charged by the People's Republic as being "the most faithful running-dog of the reactionary Vatican" and held in a labor camp, without ever being brought to trial. He would be released on June 2, 1980, because of illness and would live 14 more years before his death in 1995.
• Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser became the first president of the United Arab Republic, with Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli as the UAR vice president. In the evening, Nasser welcomed an official from the Kingdom of Yemen, Crown Prince Saif al-Islam Mohammed al-Badr, who had said that he wanted his monarchy to become a third member of the republic, while retaining its royal government and receiving Egyptian troops to aid it in its war against British forces in Aden, a request that was ultimately rejected.
• The Republic of Turkey created its first national park, the Yozgat Pine Grove, to protect a rare species of pine trees found only in Turkey's Caucasus Mountains.
• In France, the parliament voted a framework-law about Algeria, establishing single electoral districts for Frenchmen and Muslims and reaffirming the principle that Algeria was an overseas department of the French republic. On the same evening, a time bomb exploded in a bathroom in the Palais Bourbon, causing damage but no injuries.
• A 7,600 pound Mark 15 hydrogen bomb was dropped into the waters off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia, near Savannah, after the U.S. Air Force B-47 bomber carrying it collided with a U.S. Navy F-86 fighter at an altitude of. The Air Force emphasized that the bomb "was not assembled so that it could not be detonated." The bomb was never recovered.
• At Cape Canaveral, the launching of a second American satellite, Vanguard 1B, by the U.S. Navy failed 62 seconds after it started. The Vanguard 1 rocket was launched at 2:33 in the morning "only apparently to break in half" and had to be destroyed by remote command from the range safety officer.
• Born: Fabrizio Frizzi, Italian TV presenter; in Rome

  February 6, 1958 (Thursday)

• The crash of British European Airways Flight 609 killed 23 of the 44 people on board an Airspeed AS.57 Ambassador plane, including seven players on the defending English soccer football champions, Manchester United F.C., who were flying back to Manchester from West Germany after a European Cup game in Yugoslavia. The Ambassador plane had taken the Man U team to Belgrade, and landed at Munich in West Germany for refueling, touching down in snowy weather. The crew abandoned two takeoff attempts and taxied back to the tarmac, then concluded that opening the throttles more slowly would provide the power to make a safe takeoff. Accelerating to 117 knots, the plane encountered slush on the runway, slowed to 105 knots, and was unable to get airborne or to have enough runway length to stop. The airplane crashed through a boundary fence and across a small road, then slammed into a house and a garage, where it burst into flames.
• The United States Senate passed a resolution creating a special Committee on Space and Astronautics to frame legislation for a national program for space exploration.
• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the first U.S. government agency devoted to space exploration, was founded.
• Born:
• * Giuseppe Baresi, Italian soccer football player, in Travagliato
• * Michel Houellebecq, French writer; in Saint-Pierre
• Died: Charles Langbridge Morgan, 64, English writer

  February 7, 1958 (Friday)

• U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the creation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense, initially to develop a program to compete with the Soviet Union's space program. The Defense Department established the agency by its DOD Directive 5105.15, and Congress authorized its funding on February 12. The DARPA program would become the foremost government developer of technological advances that would transition from military to civilian use.
• The Partito Comunista Italiano, Italy's Communist party, announced that it had lost 300,000 members in the previous two years as a result of the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet invaders.
• The legal monopoly on transcontinental air service, granted by the Canadian government to Trans-Canada Air Lines, was ended by Transport Minister George Hees.
• Died: Walter Kingsford, 76, British stage, film and television actor

  February 8, 1958 (Saturday)

• In a purge of the ruling East German Communist Party, Deputy Premier Fred Oelßner was expelled from the Politburo of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany at the instigation of General Secretary Walter Ulbricht, because of his dissent from Ulbricht's official policies. The SED's Central Committee also expelled two liberal members, Karl Schirdewan and former Security Minister Ernst Wollweber, on the same day for "violations of Party rules". The move came two days after being approved by the Central Committee of the SED in a closed-door session, where Committee members Albert Norden and Franz Dahlem said that Schirdewan had been seeking to get the committee to replace Ulbricht as the party leader. Norden's and Dahlem's speeches were reprinted on February 26 by the SED Party newspaper, Neues Deutschland.
• A fleet of 25 French Air Force bombers and fighters crossed from French Algeria into Tunisian airspace and bombed the village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, killing 68 people, 12 of whom were children. The attack was in reprisal for a January 11 attack, launched from Tunisia by FLN guerrillas from the town, that killed 15 French soldiers, and France claimed that one of its planes had been shot down over Algeria by anti-aircraft guns fired from the Tunisian side of the border. The Tunisian government protested and demanded that all French troops in Tunisia leave immediately.
• Born: Marina Silva, Brazilian environmentalist and politician; in Rio Branco