August 14

Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar, died at Auschwitz after volunteering to take the place of a condemned fellow prisoner.

Mahāsi Sayādaw, the Burmese monk whose method of insight (vipassanā) meditation spread widely across Asia and the West, died in Yangon.

NASA's Explorer 6 satellite returned the first crude image of Earth taken from orbit, a scan of sunlit Pacific cloud cover relayed to a ground station in Hawaii.