Previous discoveries

Chuck Berry released Johnny B. Goode on 31 March 1958. Nineteen years later it was launched into space on the Voyager Golden Record — and Voyager 1 has since carried it out of the solar system, into interstellar space.

Albert Einstein published relativity in 1905, five years after quantum mechanics began. He was still alive for Turing's paper on computability, the transistor, and the DNA double helix — the two foundations of the century that followed, both laid while he was still working.

Charles de Gaulle was born in 1890 — thirteen years before the Wright brothers got off the ground. He lived through Lindbergh and Sputnik, and died in 1970, a year after the Moon landing. Powered flight began and reached the Moon inside one lifetime.

Benjamin Zephaniah was born in Birmingham on 15 April 1958. The next day, Rosalind Franklin died in London, aged 37 — four years before her X-ray work on DNA helped win others the Nobel Prize.

Ernest Hemingway died on 2 July 1961. The day before, on 1 July 1961, Diana Spencer was born. Two lives the public would spend decades mythologising, overlapping by a single day.

Woodstock opened on 17 August 1969. Twenty-five years later, to the day, Zinedine Zidane played his first match for France.

Nelson Mandela was born on 18 July 1918. Fifty years later, to the day, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce walked out of Fairchild and founded Intel.