in this our fifth installment of our occasional in search of series (see earlier installments 1, 2, 3, 4) i take a slightly different tact. this time around rather than scour the internet for relevant links to a particular concept i focus instead on the broad subject of “the first person to…” the findings were vast and the possibilities many. i decided to throw out the Neil Armstrongs and yuri gagarins of history (since you’ve already had their great accomplishments effectively drilled into your poor malleable little skulls) and to focus instead on some possibly lesser known “firsts.” collected below you will find the group of firsts i managed to collect before the vastness of cyberspace overcame me and i passed out. enjoy.
The first recorded case of an actor performing took place in 534 B.C. when the Greek performer Thespis stepped on to the stage at the Theatre Dionysus and became the first person to speak words as a character in a play.
In 1837, Robert Cocking became the first person to die from a parachute accident.
Saint Stephen was the first person to die because he loved Jesus so much that he wouldn’t stop talking about Him.
Steve Man is the first person to live in total constant intimate contact with a computer, the first semi-cyborg. Over the past twenty years, Steve Mann has been his own human guinea pig, testing his various wearable computer prototypes on himself.
The first person to add a fifth dimension to Einstein’s four was the German mathematician Theodor Kaluza in 1919.
joseph Déjacque was the first person to describe himself as a “libertarian”, in an 1857 letter which represents the first appearance of the term in print.
On September 9th, 1908 Lieutenant Thomas E. Lahm became the first passenger to fly on an airplane. on September 17, 1908 he became the first person to die in a powered airplane.
on march 24th, 1898 Robert Allison of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania became the first person to buy an American-built automobile when he bought a Winton automobile that was advertised in Scientific American.
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known as nadar, became the first person to make aerial photographs from a hot air balloon in 1858.
Dave Kunst is the first person to walk round the earth. which is to say the first person verified to have completed circling the entire land mass of the earth (with exception of the oceans) on foot.
On April 24th, 1967 Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov became the first person to die during a space mission after the lines of his spacecraft’s parachute became tangled during descent.
Actress Linda Hunt was the first person to win an Academy Award for portraying a person of the opposite sex; she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1983 for her performance as Billy Kwan, a male photographer, in The Year of Living Dangerously.
On March 18th, 1965, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov of the former Soviet Union became the first person to walk in space.
in 2003, 21-year-old Brandon Vedas, aka ‘ripper’, became the first person to kill himself online with an audience watching, signing off with the words: “I told u I was hardcore.”
the first person to log a perfect score on a coin-operated Pac-Man was Hollywood, Fla., resident Billy Mitchell. In 1999, Mitchell tallied 3,333,360 points (the highest score the board will accommodate) on a single quarter by eating every dot, fruit and ghost in his path without losing a man. It took him six hours.
in 2004 David Welch became the first person to win protection as a whistleblower under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed by Congress in 2002 in the wake of corporate scandals at Enron, WorldCom and other firms.
The underlying structure of living things began to be appreciated in the 17th Century when the microscope was invented. In the 1660’s, Robert Hooke, an English scientist, was the first person to see cells though cell theory didn’t develop until the 19th Century.
The first person to see the Crab Nebula was an English physician and amateur astronomer, John Bevis in 1731.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to see and describe bacteria in 1676. He used only a single lens and not the compound lens of the true microscopes we employ today; which makes his observations all the more amazing.
The first person to see new york from above in an airplane was Wilbur Wright, in 1909. His first test flight was an unannounced hop around the harbor, startling those who happened to see it. Word spread; crowds crammed the waterfront from Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. Then he took off again, going up to 200 feet, buzzing the Cunard liner Lusitania.
On September 3, 1935 Malcolm Campbell reached 304.331 miles per hour on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, becoming the first person to drive an automobile over 300 mph.
New Zealander Alexander von Tunzelmann became the first person to set foot on Antarctica, at Cape Adare, in 1899.
On July 31, 1790 inventor Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont became the first person to be issued a patent in the United States. His patented invention was an improvement in the “making of Pot Ash by a new apparatus & process”.
Joseph Pline is the first person to use the word “aeroplane” in a 1855 paper proposing a gas filled dirigible glider with propellers.
Charles Brooks Jr. (April 1, 1942 – December 7, 1982) was a convicted murderer who was the first person executed by lethal injection in the United States. It was the first execution in Texas since 1964.
In August 1961, cosmonaut Gherman Titov was the first person to suffer from “space sickness” (i.e. motion sickness in space, not to be confused with “space madness”).
in 1988 bill cosby became the first person to personally accept his Razzies (The Golden Raspberry Awards or Razzies intended to dishonor the worst acting, screenwriting, song-writing, directing, and films that the film industry had to offer.) he won 3: Worst Picture, Worst Actor and Worst Screenplay for Leonard Part 6.
in 2002 Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo around the world nonstop in a balloon.
The first person to be executed via the electric chair was William Kemmler in New York’s Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890.
Rudolf Schenk became the first person to escape from a stricken aircraft with an ejector seat on January 13, 1942, when he ejected from his Heinkel He 280 prototype jet fighter.
Sir John Sinclair the Scottish politician and writer was the first person to use the word “statistics” in the English language, in his vast, pioneering work, Statistical Account of Scotland.
in the early 1980’s, Mark Gonzales was the first person to ollie up a curb and to clear a set of stairs.
The first person to seriously apply general relativity to cosmology without the stabilizing cosmological constant was Alexander Friedmann. Friedmann discovered the expanding-universe solution to general relativity field equations in 1922, which was proved by Edwin Hubble’s observations in 1929.
Hennig Brand was the first person to discover a new element. Brand was a bankrupt German merchant who was trying to discover the Philosopher’s Stone — an object that is supposed to turn inexpensive metals into gold. He experimented with distilling human urine until in 1669 he finally obtained a glowing white substance which he named phosphorus. He kept his discovery secret, until 1680 when Robert Boyle rediscovered it and it became public.
in 1989 A federal grand jury indicted Cornell University student Robert T. Morris, Jr. for releasing a computer worm, thus he became the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was convicted in 1990, sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a fine of $10,050 and the cost of his supervision.
Charles F. Dowd (co-principal of the Temple Grove Ladies Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York) was the first person to propose multiple time zones for any country, those for the railways of the United States. He did not propose their extension to the entire world.
Paracelsus, “the Father of modern toxicology.” who lived in the 15th century was the first person to explain the dose response relationship of toxic substances.
in 1963 winston churchill became the first person to receive Honorary U.S. Citizenship.
Ivan Meštrovi?, the Croatian sculptor, renowned as possibly the greatest sculptor of religious subject matter since the Renaissance, was the first person to have a one man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
willard scott was the first person to portray the mcdonalds’ clown ronald mcdonald. he played Ronald in the first three television ads featuring the character.
englishman Thomas Stevens was the first person to circle the globe by bicycle.
after developing some of the earliest devices to be used in radio astronomy, Robert Hanbury Brown used his “optical stellar intensity interferometer” and became the first person to measure the diameter of the star Sirius.
The Hispanic ascetic Priscillian of Avila was the first person to be executed for heresy, only sixty years after the First Council of Nicaea, in 385. He was executed at the orders of Emperor Magnus Maximus, over the procedural objections of bishops Ambrose of Milan and Martin of Tours, who claimed the Churches’ right to punish its own.
On July 9, 2005, Danny Way jumped the Great Wall of China on a skateboard, becoming the first person to clear the wall without motorized aid.
... and that just about does it for me folks, my eyes are bleeding, and i loathe to become the first person to dye from posting an over-long blog post. until next time…