Timeline November 1971

Events in November 1971 12

• 1970 – 1971 1971 World Snooker Championship John Spencer Title 2 Held in Australia across several months. Winner: John Spencer; Runner-up: Warren Simpson. Score: 37–29.
• 1971 Al Green releases Let's Stay Together Number one His signature song, number one in 1972.
• 1971 Billy Joel releases Cold Spring Harbor Debut album Mastered at the wrong speed, making him sound high-pitched.
• 1971 Meddle -- Echoes and the sound of the future Meddle (November 1971) contains 'Echoes' -- a 23-minute piece occupying the entire second side that is arguably Pink Floyd's greatest single composition. 'Echoes' begins with a single piano note through a Leslie speaker (creating the famous 'ping'), develops through extended improvisational passages and climaxes in a massive unison statement before dissolving into birdsong. The piece demonstrates every element of the mature Pink Floyd sound: Gilmour's lyrical guitar, Wright's atmospheric keyboards, Waters's bass, Mason's driving drums and the band's collective ability to sustain a large-scale musical arc.
• 1971 Televised debate with Noam Chomsky Dutch broadcast exchange on human nature, justice, and power In a widely watched Dutch television debate, Foucault and the American linguist Noam Chomsky sparred over human nature, language, and whether justice could be grounded in universal norms. Foucault argued that concepts of justice were themselves expressions of historically specific power relations rather than timeless ideals, a position that crystallized his difference from Enlightenment humanism.
• 1971 Led Zeppelin release Led Zeppelin IV Stairway to Heaven The untitled fourth album — one of the best-selling albums of all time.
• 1971 – 2000 Big Pun (1971-2000) Died 7 February 2000, aged 28 Christopher Rios, known as Big Pun, was a Bronx rapper of Puerto Rican descent and the first solo Latino hip-hop artist to have an album certified platinum, with 1998's Capital Punishment. Admired for his rapid, intricate rhyming, he belonged to the Terror Squad collective. He died of a heart attack after long struggles with his weight.
• 1971 Intel 4004 — the first microprocessor Intel introduces the 4004 on 15 November 1971 — the world's first commercially available microprocessor, a complete central processing unit on a single chip. The 4004 is designed by Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor for a Japanese calculator company (Busicom), which requests a custom chip set. Intel's Ted Hoff proposes a general-purpose programmable processor instead of a fixed-function chip set. Intel buys back the rights from Busicom for $60,000. The 4004 contains 2,300 transistors and runs at 740kHz. The entire computing revolution flows from this chip.
• 1971 Sly and the Family Stone release There's a Riot Goin' On Dark funk A murky, drum-machine funk album, a number one.
• 1971 D.B. Cooper Hijacking Unidentified hijacker parachutes from a Boeing 727 with ransom cash A man using the alias Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight, extorted $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted from the plane over Washington state, never to be identified or found. It remains the only unsolved air piracy case in American aviation history. Portions of the ransom money later surfaced along the Columbia River in 1980.
• 1971 The Kinks release Muswell Hillbillies Music hall and country A tribute to their working-class north London roots.
• 1971 Edith Tolkien dies — Lúthien Edith Mary Tolkien dies on 29 November 1971, aged 82. On her gravestone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, Tolkien has inscribed the name 'Lúthien' — after the Elvish maiden who gives up her immortality for love of the mortal Beren. The inscription makes explicit what Tolkien had always believed: that his own story with Edith was the primary story of his mythology. He writes to his son Christopher: 'She was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.' He returns to Oxford after Edith's death and is elected an Honorary Fellow of Merton College.