1973
I have an odd relationship with this year - so I collected some big events that happened then. This list will grow.
The OPEC oil embargo on the United States.
Committee on the Environment is created in the European Parliament.
The Nixon administration began negotiations on what came to be known as “the petrodollar recycling system”. Under the arrangement Saudis would only sell their oil in US dollars, and invest the excess of their oil earnings in US banks, capital markets. The IMF would then use this money to facilitate loans to oil importers who could be having difficulty in covering the increase in oil prices. The arrangement kept the price of dollar high which allowed US to print money and buy anything it wants. It is claimed making sure most oil is sold in dollars is at the root of most American wars after the 70s.
The Standard Model of Physics was finalized which unified the three fundamental forces in one framework. Particle physics is said to have reached its peak (no significant development took place since). The model is still criticized however as having too many constants to describe the nature, as being not fundamental.
Syria and Egypt launched the Yom Kippur War against Israel, and lost. Also, this war was not as much off a slam-dunk as the previous Six Day War had been during 1967, and probably would not have been won if US had not supplied Israel heavily. Egypt also become an American client-state right afterwards, dumping the Soviets.
Britain entered the European common market: Funny story here is GCHQ hacked the communications and intercepted messages between other European countries to get a leg-up in the negotiations.
Roe vs Wade Supreme Court decision on abortion.
Joe Biden joins the Senate
On April, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) was formed to trade options on common stocks. This marked the first time an option was traded on an exchange.
World Trade Center in New York becomes the tallest building in the world.
The U.S. helped the overthrow of the elected government of Allende of Chile and put in place a military dictatorship under General Pinochet, on September 11. This is basically 9/11 for Chileans.
The Sears Tower in Chicago is finished, becoming the new world’s tallest building in the world, beating WTC’s record, in the same year.
Nixon was inaugurated for his second term in office.
Just two days after Nixon’s inauguration, his predecessor, former President Lyndon Johnson, suffered a heart attack and died.
Vietnam War ended, Paris Piece Accords signed.
Watergate hearings begin.
Nixon abandoned price controls at the start of the year.
Student-led rebellion, demonstrations against the military junta in Greece.
Newly created Bangladesh elects first Prime Minister.
Sydney Opera House is opened.
Bruce Lee dies.
The Bosporus Bridge is completed joining Europe and Asia in Istanbul, at the 50th anniversary of the republic’s foundation, a few weeks after a new government was elected (the gov, comprised of largely leftists, partly Islamists, did not last long, and its only important decision would be to invade Cyprus next year, which in turn, helped trigger the fall of the junta in Greece, kinda like British invasion of the Falklands triggering the fall of the junta in Argentina).
Wage increase started to slow, a situation that lasted until today. The link between productivity increases and wage increase broke, and continued to diverge ever since.
Labor’s share of income starts decreasing the same year (from link)
Black and Sholes published their seminal paper on pricing options.
Leonid Brezhnev visits Bonn - first time a Soviet leader ever set foot in West German territory.
According to the Polity dataset and looking at yearly averaged democracy scores, democracy was fell to its lowest point in the 20th century. Since the 20th century is over, this year holds the record for lack of democracy around the world within that century.
Denis Ritchie published his research paper on the famous computer language called C. “The development of the C programming language was a huge step forward and was the right middle ground - C struck exactly the right balance, to let you write at a high level and be much more productive, but when you needed to, you could control exactly what happened” says Bill Dally, chief scientist of NVIDIA and Bell Professor of Engineering at Stanford. “[It] set the tone for the way that programming was done for several decades.”
Clifford Cocks, working in secrecy at the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) discovered a public-key based cryptosystem, three years before Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman publicized the same approach called RSA.
Thompson, Ritchie, and others at AT&T Bell Labs began developing a small operating system on a little-used PDP-7. The operating system was soon christened Unix, a pun on an earlier operating system project called MULTICS. In 1972-1973 the system was rewritten in the programming language C, an unusual step that was visionary: due to this decision, Unix was the first widely-used operating system that could switch from and outlive its original hardware [..] The name Unix (originally Unics) is itself a pun on Multics. The U in Unix is rumored to stand for uniplexed as opposed to the multiplexed of Multics, further underscoring the designers’ rejections of Multics’ complexity in favor of a more straightforward and workable approach for smaller computers.
With the Smithsonian Agreement, most of the world’s currencies switched to a floating exchange rate joining United States who had switched two years previously.
The government agency ARPA funds the outfitting of a packet radio research van at SRI to develop standards for a Packet Radio Network (PRNET). As the unmarked van drives through the San Francisco Bay Area, stuffed full of hackers and sometimes uniformed generals, this tech was to become the basis of wireless, packet-switched digital networks, including the kind your mobile phone uses today.
Mr. Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC adopted and tweaked the [wireless communication] ALOHAnet technology in creating Ethernet.
Professor Lighthill was asked by the UK Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the United Kingdom. His report, now called the Lighthill report, criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its “grandiose objectives.”. This is the beginning of the so-called AI Winter where funding for the field were substantially reduced.
The Criticize Lin (Biao), Criticize Confucius campaign was started by Mao Zedong which lasted until the end of the Cultural Revolution.
The War Powers Act is passed which attempts to define when and how the US president could send troops to battle by adding strict time frames for reporting to Congress after sending troops to war, in addition to other measures.
After the oil embargo Nejat Veziroglu, a Turkish born scientist, formed the Clean Energy Research Institute (CERI) at the University of Miami to investigate alternate energy sources. Veziroglu however already had done extensive research on hydrogen as a fuel use (on planetary missions) and knew it to be a viable resource. Organization’s findings confirmed this, so Veziroglu organized the first major conference next year on hydrogen energy, and started popularizing its use. Words such as “hydrogen economy” were first coined by Dr. Veziroglu.
Skylab, the United States’ first space station, is launched.
The Sikorsky S-69, an American experimental co-axial compound helicopter flew for the first time on July 26, 1973.
Genetic engineering based on recombination was pioneered by American biochemists Stanley N. Cohen and Herbert W. Boyer, who were among the first to cut DNA into fragments, rejoin different fragments, and insert the new genes into E. coli bacteria, which then reproduced.
Economist Milton Friedman convinced Richard Nixon to end the military conscription.
Spanish PM is assassinated in Madrid by the Basque separatist group ETA. The assassination is considered to be the biggest attack against the state since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.
Pierre Trudeau (Justin Trudeau’s father) was the Prime Minister in Canada, Willy Brandt (guy who fell on his knees apologizing for DE actions in WWII later) was Germany’s Chancellor, Indira Gandhi was PM in India (first and to date the only female Indian PM).
Cheap gas and an endless real estate boom were hallmarks of the thirty years of postwar American dominance and prosperity; both ended in 1973–1974. There were shortages of gasoline, electricity, and even onions, and rumors of insufficient stockpiles of everything from mustard to vegetable oil to cat food. In November of 1973, The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson made a joke about a toilet paper shortage, prompting a run on toilet paper as Americans rushed to buy every roll they could find.
The famous image of Lenna or Lena became a standard test image widely used in the field of image processing. It is a picture of the Swedish model Lena from previous year’s Playboy magazine.
George Foreman beats Frazer (who had beaten Ali beforehand) in a surprise win and becomes champion. Ali would beat Foreman the next year and also beat Frazer later on.
Mariner 10 a space probe launched by NASA on 3 November 1973 flied by the planets Mercury and Venus the next year. It was the first spacecraft to perform flybys of multiple planets.
The first spacecraft to ever reach Jupiter, NASA’s Pioneer 10 which launched on March 3, 1972 reached Jupiter on December 3, 1973.
The use of supercomputers to solve aerodynamic problems began to pay off around this time. One early success was the experimental NASA aircraft called HiMAT (Highly Maneuverable Aircraft Technology), started in 1973, designed to test concepts of high maneuverability for the next generation of fighter planes. Wind tunnel tests of a preliminary design for HiMAT showed that it would have unacceptable drag at speeds near the speed of sound; if built that way the plane would be unable to provide any useful data. The cost of redesigning it in further wind tunnel tests would have been around $150,000 and would have unacceptably delayed the project. Instead, the pwing was redesigned by a computer at a cost of 6,000 dollars.
Akaike Information Criteron discovered.
Lattice gas models were first introduced by Hardy, Pomeau, and de Pazzis. Their paper became the basis of Lattice-Boltzmann methods.
A chef named Peng Chang-kuei created the General Tso’s Chicken, he was a banquet chef for Chinese Nationalists and he fled to Taiwan with them after their 1949 defeat by Mao Zedong’s Communists. It was there that he came up with the general idea for the dish, and he brought it to the States when he immigrated to New York in 1973.
Movies Released in 1973
The first movie based on Star Trek TV show was released, not in US, but in Turkey - Tourist Omer Travels in Space is the first movie based on ST universe.
Other movies: James Bond Live and Let Die, Soylent Green, The Exorcist, American Graffiti, The Sting. Oh and Magnum Force.
Movies Taking Place in 1973
Kong: Skull Island starring Samuel Jackson takes place right after the piece concluding the Vietnam War, and some of the soldiers dealing with that go to an island where they encounter a giant orangutan.
In X-Men: Days of Future Past the character Wolverine goes back in time to 1973 to fix some problems that would unravel in the future. He wakes up in US next to a lava lamp.
Famous books: The Princess Bride, Rendezvous with Rama.