| 1st January 1959 | Cultivars of plants named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin. |
| 3rd January 1959 | Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. state. |
| 29th January 1959 | Walt Disney releases “Sleeping Beauty“. |
| 3rd February 1959 | Buddy Holly, American rock singer (b. 1936) is killed in a plane crash. |
| 16th February 1959 | Fidel Castro becomes Premier of Cuba. |
| 9th March 1959 | The Barbie doll, created by U.S. business woman Ruth Handler, debuts at the American International Toy Fair. |
| May 1959 | The first Ten Tors hike is held in Dartmoor. |
| May 1959 | Import tariffs are lifted in the United Kingdom. |
| 24th May 1959 | British Empire Day is renamed Commonwealth Day. |
| 25th July 1959 | The ‘SR-N1’ hovercraft crosses the English Channel in just over two hours. The flight occurs on the 50th anniversary of Louis Bleriot's first crossing of the Channel by the heavier-than-air craft. |
| 21st August 1959 | Hawaii is admitted as the 50th U.S. state. |
| 14th September 1959 | ‘Luna 2’ becomes the first man-made object to crash on the Moon. |
| 7th October 1959 | Luna 3’ , the U.S.S.R. probe, sends back the first ever photographs of the far side of the Moon. |
| 12th October 1959 | A large-scale diamond robbery takes place in London. |
| 14th October 1959 | Errol Flynn, Australian actor (b. 1909) dies from a large heart attack. |
| 2nd November 1959 | The first section of the M1 motorway opens between the present junctions five and eighteen. |
| 18th November 1959 | MGM's widescreen, multimillion dollar version of “Ben-Hur“ is released, becoming the studio's greatest hit up to that time. It is highly acclaimed by critics and eventually wins eleven Academy Awards - a record held until 1998, when 1997's “Titanic” becomes the first film to equal this tally. |
| 1st December 1959 | Twelve countries - including the United States and the Soviet Union - sign the landmark Antarctic Treaty, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans military activity on that continent. This is the first arms control agreement established during the Cold War. |