The Half-Century Quiz - Answers
1952 Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly star in the Western film High Noon.
1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay are the first to climb Mount Everest.
1954 Gamal Abdel Nasser ousts Gen. Muhammad Naguib as president of Egypt.
1955 American rock 'n' roll musician Bill Haley records Rock Around the Clock.
1956 Archbishop Makarios III is deported from Cyprus by the British.
1957 Dr. Seuss publishes the children's book The Cat in the Hat.
1958 Russian writer Boris Pasternak publishes the novel Doctor Zhivago.
1959 Hawaii is inaugurated as the 50th state of the Union.
1960 The Soviets shoot down a U-2 spy plane; U.S. pilot Gary Powers is captured.
1961 American writer Joseph Heller publishes the anti-war novel Catch-22.
1962 Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor star in Cleopatra, the most expensive film to date.
1963 John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is shot and killed by Jack Ruby.
1964 Ian Smith becomes prime minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
1965 The Black Muslim leader Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City.
1966 The Hawker Harrier becomes the first VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft.
1967 Yachtsman Francis Chichester completes the first solo voyage around the world.
1968 Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick directs 2001: A Space Odyssey.
1969 A rock-music festival at Woodstock, N.Y, attracts a crowd of 500,000.
1970 The Apollo 13 crew return to earth after an explosion aboard their command module.
1971 Lt. William Calley is found guilty of killing Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.
1972 - Palestinian terrorists kill 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
1973 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn publishes the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago.
1974 Emperor Haile Selassie is deposed in a military coup in Ethiopia.
1975 - Prime Minister Pol Pot begins a reign of terror in Kampuchea.
1976 - Israeli commandos rescue hijacked airplane passengers at Entebbe, Uganda.
1977 - George Lucas directs the first Star Wars space fantasy film.
1978 - President Carter oversees the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel.
1979 - An accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant causes a near-disaster.
1980 - Lech Walesa heads Solidarity, the first union movement in a communist country.
1981 - John Hinckley, Jr. shoots and seriously wounds President Reagan.
1982 - Argentina invades the Falkland Islands.
1983 - The compact disc is introduced for recorded music.
1984 - A toxic gas leak kills 2,000 and affects an estimated 150,000 in Bhopal, India.
1985 - French agents sink the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand.
1986 - The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes after launch, killing the crew of seven.
1987 - Colonel Oliver North testifies at the Iran-Contra Affair hearings.
1988 - Austrian president Kurt Waldheim is exonerated of involvement in war crimes.
1989 - The Satanic Verses is condemned by Muslims; Salman Rushdie goes into hiding.
1990 South African president F.W. De Klerk releases Nelson Mandela.
1991 - Canada and Inuit (Eskimo) leaders agree to establish a new territory, Nunavut.
1992 The United Nations holds an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
1993 - Terrorists explode a bomb at New York's World Trade Center.
1994
1995
1996 Frankie Dettori gained a place in sporting history by winning 7 horse races in 1 day.
1997 Trevor Rees-Jones was the sole survivor of the crash which killed Princess Diana.
1998 The military operation into Iraq was called Desert Fox.
1999 Mohamed Ali became the BBC Sports Personality of the Century.
2000 Millennium I. and Western Samoa were the 1st & the last 2 islands to join the millennium.
2001 The 1st outbreak, in the UK, of Foot & Mouth disease was in Northumberland.
2002 Alain Baxter was the 1st British skier to gain a medal at a Winter Olympics, even if it was later retracted.