October 1958

October 1, 1958 (Wednesday)

• China inaugurated its second TV broadcaster, Shanghai Television, 29 days after launching Peking Television.
• India adopted the metric system of measurement to replace the Imperial units that had been the standard under British rule.
• Tunisia and Morocco joined the Arab League.
• The United Kingdom transferred sovereignty of Christmas Island from Singapore to Australia.
• L'Union pour la nouvelle République, a new political party organized by French Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle and many of his supporters who had been part of the Social Republicans, was founded to field candidates for the November 23 parliamentary elections.
• Nigeria Airways began operations as West African Airways Corporation Nigeria with a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser for long range flights between Lagos and London, and several Douglas DC-3 airplanes to fly to Dakar in Senegal.
• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, started operations and replaced the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics as the United States space agency. The nonmilitary space projects which had been conducted by the Advanced Research Projects Agency were transferred to the jurisdiction of the NASA.
• Born:
• *Mark Bathum, American paralympic Alpine skier; in Seattle
• Died:
• *Itzikl Kramtweiss, 92, Russian-born American musician who specialized in the klezmer music form
• *Antonijs Springovičs, 81, Latvian Roman Catholic priest and Archbishop of Riga since 1923

  October 2, 1958 (Thursday)

• The West African nation of Guinea declared itself independent from France, with colonial prime minister Ahmed Sékou Touré as its first president, by a vote of the colonial legislators of the Assembly of French Guinea. The parliament renamed itself the "Constituent Assembly of the Republic of Guinea", and lowered the French Tricolore flag, but had no flag to raise in its place over the Assembly Building in Conakry. In retaliation for Guinea having become the lone French colony to vote against becoming a member of the French Community, the former French colonial administrators began removing all colonial government property, and France halted payment of pensions to Guinean soldiers who had fought for France during World War One and World War Two. According to a 1984 account after Touré's death, "as a warning to other French-speaking territories, the French pulled out of Guinea over a two-month period, taking everything they could with them. They unscrewed light bulbs, removed plans for sewage pipelines in Conakry, the capital, and even burned medicines rather than leave them for the Guineans."
• A Touch of the Poet, a play completed by Eugene O'Neill in 1942 but never staged during his lifetime, was performed for the first time, premiering almost five years after his death. The initial run of 284 performances at The Little Theatre on Broadway starred Helen Hayes and Eric Portman, and featured Betty Field and Kim Stanley in supporting roles. The play would be revived three times on Broadway between 1967 and 2005.
• Born:
• *Dr. Augusto Cury, Brazilian psychiatrist and popular writer who pioneered the Multifocal Theory regarding human cognition; in Colina, São Paulo state
• *Daniel Peacock, English TV comedian; in Hammersmith, Middlesex
• Died: Marie Stopes, 77, British scientist and women's rights activist

  October 3, 1958 (Friday)

• Television Iran began broadcasting from Tehran, bringing the first TV programming to the Middle Eastern kingdom. Initially, the station, founded by industrialist Habib Sabet, featured locally produced quiz shows, and American TV shows that were re-dubbed into the Persian language, Farsi. The general manager was Vance Hallack, an American TV executive for NBC and later for Baghdad Television in Iraq.
• France's Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle spoke to an audience at the Algerian city of Constantine and unveiled his proposed economic development program to bring the standard of living for Algerians closer to that of Metropolitan France within five years. The Constantine Plan was also intended to weaken support for independence activists and to prevent foreign intervention from the Soviet Union. The plan would fail to prevent Algerian independence, which would happen in 1962. While the crowd applauded de Gaulle, most of them refused to join him in a singing of the French national anthem, "La Marseillaise".
• French explorer Alain Bombard, an expert on survival-at-sea, was one of only five survivors in rough seas off the coast of the French town of Étel, after a wave capsized a rubber dinghy that he and six crew were testing, and a second wave capsized the lifeboat and crew of seven more that came to the rescue. Nine of the 14 people on board were swept away in the waters of the Bay of Biscay. A nearby tugboat saved Dr. Bombard and four men, while another boat located eight of the nine bodies.
• Elections were held in Brazil for the 326 seats of the Câmara dos Deputados and 21 of the 63 seats of the Senado Federal. Candidates from nine different political parties ran for office, with President Juscelino Kubitschek's Partido Social Democrático and its coalition candidates winning 37% of the vote.
• The Committee on Space Research was founded by representatives of the U.S., the Soviet Union and other world powers at a meeting of the General Assembly of the International Council of Scientific Institutions.
• Studies and plans of the American crewed satellite project were presented to the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
• Died: Margarita Morozova, 83, Russian socialite, patron of the arts and philanthropist in Imperial Russia, who later lived in poverty in the Soviet Union after the confiscation of her properties.

  October 4, 1958 (Saturday)

• The new Constitution of France was signed into law, establishing the French Fifth Republic with a 576-member Assemblée Nationale elected directly by the people. The upper house of the French Parliament, the 309-member Sénat, was elected later by municipal representatives rather than by popular vote. The parliament's powers were limited, and the President of France had broad authority to promulgate regulations. A nine-member Constitutional Council had the authority to review statutes and executive regulations to determine whether they conformed to the new constitution.
• The first transatlantic jet airplane service flight took place as the British Overseas Airways Corporation began using the new De Havilland Comet 4 aircraft. The first flight took off from London's Heathrow Airport at 9:55 in the morning toward Idlewild Airport in New York City, where it arrived 10 hours later with 32 passengers, including BOAC Chairman Gerard d'Erlanger. Two hours and six minutes after the BOAC flight departed London, another Comet 4 took off from New York, bound for London, and crossed the Atlantic in only 6 hours and 12 minutes, compared to 11½ hours for the same eastward trip in a piston-driven airliner. The flight came 22 days ahead of Pan American World Airways 's October 26 flight with the Boeing 707 jet.
• Cooke Air Force Base in southern California was renamed Vandenberg Air Force Base in honor of the late Hoyt Vandenberg, a 4-star general who had served as the second Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force from 1948 to 1953.

  October 5, 1958 (Sunday)

• Moeslim Taher, a 24-year-old professor, founded Jayabaya University, a private university in Jakarta in Indonesia, which originally had only 11 students. As of 2022, it has more than 4,000 students.
• Two years after U.S. oil prospector James W. Menhall discovered the Karatchok oil field in Syria, the United Arab Republic nationalized the Syrian oil industry and confiscated the Menhall Company's equipment and three drilling rigs without compensation.
• Congolese nationalists from different ethnic groups, seeking independence from Belgium, founded the Mouvement National Congolais political party in the Belgian Congo. Patrice Lumumba of Tetela ethnicity, and Cyrille Adoula and Joseph Iléo of Bangala origin, signed the MNC charter. Joseph Kasa-Vubu, a Kongo leader, refused to join the group. Kasa-Vubu would become the first president upon Congolese independence, and Lumumba the first prime minister.
• Clinton High School in the U.S., a formerly all-white school in Clinton, Tennessee that had admitted 12 African-American students in 1956, was heavily damaged by a series of dynamite explosions, apparently placed by opponents of racial desegregation. Nobody was injured in the blast, but the school sustained $300,000 worth of damages, equivalent to three million dollars 60 years later.
• Born:
• *Dr. André Kuipers, Dutch physician and astronaut who spent 203 days in two Soyuz missions to the International Space Station; in Amsterdam
• *Manuel Landeta, Mexican TV actor
• *Raul "Rolly" Quizon, Philippine comedian and TV actor; in Manila
• *Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist, author, and TV host; in New York City
• Died: William F. Buckley Sr., 77, American lawyer and oil magnate

  October 6, 1958 (Monday)

• The government of Pakistan suppressed a brief rebellion by Yar Khan of Kalat, who had been ruler of the Khanate of Kalat from 1933 to 1947, when Pakistan had been part of British India and Kalat was one of the princely states. Police in Pakistan's Balochistan province raided the Khan's palace and charged him with sedition.
• Continental Classroom, an educational television program offered in the early morning hours by the NBC television network in the U.S., went on the air as the first widely seen distance learning program that offered college credit. While correspondence courses had been a staple around the world since the 19th century, Continental Classroom was the first distance learning program taught simultaneously to students across the United States. The program, designed to upgrade science education, continued until 1963, providing instruction starting with a physics course and a chemistry course in the first year. The premiere half-hour episode, at 6:30, was conducted by Dr. Harvey Elliott White, professor of physics at the University of California, who had as his guest Professor James R. Killian Jr., president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Personnel from the Langley Research Center visited the Army Ballistic Missile Agency to open negotiations for procuring Redstone and Jupiter launch vehicles for crewed satellite projects.
• Died: Lieutenant Colonel Klavdia Fomicheva, 40, Soviet Russian fighter pilot during World War II and Heroine of the Soviet Union, died after a prolonged illness.