felt strongly that rendezvous would soon be essential, that the technique should be developed immediately, and that NASA should make rendezvous experiments to develop the technique and establish the feasibility of rendezvous. At Hughes Research Laboratory in Malibu, California, physicist Theodore Maiman focused a high-powered flash lamp on a silver-coated ruby rod, and created the first working laser. May 17, 1960 (Tuesday) "Radio Swan", secretly funded and operated by the American CIA, began broadcasting anti-Communist propaganda to Cuba, from a transmitter on Swan Island off of the coast of Honduras.Died: Joseph Taborsky, 36, who had robbed and murdered six people over a six-week period, was executed in Connecticut in the electric chair. May 18, 1960 (Wednesday) The 132nd and last original broadcast of the landmark American TV series Playhouse 90, was shown on CBS, with the telecast of "In the Presence of Mine Enemies".Born: Jari Kurri, Finnish ice hockey player and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee, in Helsinki Yannick Noah, French tennis player who won the French Open at age 23, in Sedan May 19, 1960 (Thursday) The largest anti-nuclear rally held in the United States, up to that time, took place at Madison Square Garden in New York, as 17,000 people attended to hear speeches by Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, Alf Landon, Walter Reuther and others demanding worldwide disarmament. In Japan, conservative Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi called for a surprise snap vote on a revised version of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in the National Diet, violating parliamentary norms by cutting off debate earlier than expected and leading to a protest sit-in by opposition Japan Socialist Party Diet members. In the so-called "May 19th Incident," Kishi introduced 500 police officers to the Diet building and had the Socialist Party members physically removed from the legislature, before ramming the treaty through just after midnight the next day with only members of his own party present. These actions, widely perceived to be anti-democratic, will lead to a dramatic upsurge in the ongoing Anpo protests against the treaty in the rest of May and June. The first polling organization in the Soviet Union, the "Public Opinion Institute", was announced by the Party newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. From 1960 to 1967, Komsomol took surveys on such topics as "How has your standard of living changed?" May 20, 1960 (Friday) In Japan, the lower house of the Diet of Japan voted at to ratify the new