Gagarin's flight
The first human in space circles the Earth
On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 became the first human in space. Circling the Earth once in 108 minutes, he landed safely in the Saratov region. The flight was a triumph for the Soviet space programme.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Did you know
Gagarin flew into space in April 1961; that August, the Berlin Wall went up.
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 22 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 14 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 13 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 12 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 19 years later
Europe
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 25 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 20 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 8 years earlier
- 1957 Treaty of Rome — 4 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — same year
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 13 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 18 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 19 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 5 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 3 years earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 1 year earlier
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 2 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 6 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 16 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 8 years earlier
- 1958–1962 Great Leap Forward — 3 years earlier
- 1964 First Shinkansen high-speed railway — 3 years later
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 14 years later
Americas
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 1 year earlier
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — 1 year later
- 1969 Moon landing — 8 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 9 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 22 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 25 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 20 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 19 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 7 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 2 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 87)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 80)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 72)
- Mao Zedong (aged 68)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 43)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 32)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 31)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 27)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 77)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 72)