1957 (MCMLVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1957th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 957th year of the 2nd millennium, the 57th year of the 20th century, and the 8th year of the 1950s decade.
January 1 – The Saarland joins West Germany.
January 3 – Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.
January 5 – South African player Russell Endean becomes the first batsman to be dismissed for having handled the ball, in Test cricket.
January 9 – British Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigns.
January 10 – Harold Macmillan becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
January 11 – The African Convention is founded in Dakar.
January 14 – Kripalu Maharaj is named fifth Jagadguru (world teacher), after giving seven days of speeches before 500 Hindu scholars.
January 15 – The film Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's reworking of Macbeth, is released in Japan.
January 20
Dwight D. Eisenhower is privately sworn in for a second term, as President of the United States.
Israel withdraws from the Sinai Peninsula (captured from Egypt on October 29, 1956).
January 26 – The Ibirapuera Planetarium (the first in the Southern Hemisphere) is inaugurated in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.
February 2 – President Iskander Mirza of Pakistan lays the foundation-stone of the Guddu Barrage across the Indus River, near Sukkur.
February 4
France prohibits U.N. involvement in Algeria.
The first nuclear-powered submarine, , logs its 60,000th nautical mile, matching the endurance of the fictional Nautilus described in Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It is decommissioned on March 3, 1980.
A coal gas explosion at the giant Bishop Coal Mine in Bishop, Virginia, United States, kills 37 men.
February 6 – The Soviet Union announces that Swedish envoy Raoul Wallenberg had died in a Soviet prison ("possibly of a heart attack"), on July 17, 1947.
February 10 – The Confederation of African Football is founded, at a meeting in Khartoum.