The “Birmingham Six” are released. The 6 men had been wrongly sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for the IRA Birmingham pub bombings.

Factory Plane Crash in China. At least 200 people are killed when a plane crashes into a factory in China. According to some sources, the plane had previously been stolen by the pilot who was not qualified to fly it.

The leaders of Germany and Israel confer for the first time. 15 years after the end of World War II, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion met at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York.

For the first time in history, a dying patient's life is saved by penicillin. Although some claim that the pioneering trials at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, England resulted in the first cures using penicillin, Orvan Hess and John Bumstead are generally credited with the first documented successful treatment.

The Lakeview Gusher causes the largest accidental oil spill in history. The spill lasted 18 months and 9 million barrels of crude oil were released.