Firsts Read online

  Billionaire

  On September 29, 1916, John Davison Rockefeller’s net worth officially surpassed $1 billion, making him the world’s first billionaire. Born in Richford, New York, he became an American industrialist and philanthropist who revolutionized the petroleum industry. In 1870, he founded the Standard Oil Company, and as gasoline grew in importance, Rockefeller’s wealth soared. His empire grew as he bought out smaller oil companies, and eventually, Rockefeller’s company controlled more than 90 percent of the American oil market. Many regard him as the richest man in history.

  Bingo

  The first game of bingo can be traced back to 1530 to an Italian version called Lo Giuoco del Lotto D’Italia, or The Clearance of the Lot of Italy. That early game featured 90 balls instead of the 75-ball version common today and was played in a weekly tournament for the purpose of increasing Italy’s budget without imposing additional taxes. In 1929, bingo was first played in the United States at a carnival in Atlanta, Georgia. Dried beans were used as markers, and the game was known as beano. Its fun and popularity spread from there. At a New York party later in the year, Edwin Lowe, a toy salesman, overheard an overly excited tongue-tied lady yell out “Bingo!” instead of “Beano!” upon winning a game. Lowe developed and marketed the game with the new name bingo, and the phenomenon was born.

  Biofuel

  The first biofuel—a solid, liquid, or gas fuel derived from relatively recently dead biological material—was wood. Wood has been in use ever since man first discovered fire for cooking and heating.

  The second most common type of biofuel is ethanol, a colorless liquid that’s been used by humans since prehistory as the intoxicating ingredient of alcoholic beverages. Ethanol is made by fermenting plant sugars and distilling the alcohol, and can be blended with petroleum-based gasoline as a fuel to lower emissions and increase engine performance. Ethanol was first prepared synthetically in 1826 through the independent efforts of Englishman Henry Hennel and S. G. Sérullas in France.

  Bird Banding

  The first record of a metal band attached to a bird’s leg was around 1595, when one of France’s Henry IV’s banded Peregrine falcons was lost while chasing and attacking a bustard (a bird with long legs, a round body, and a fairly short beak). The falcon showed up a day later in Malta—about 1,350 miles away!—nonchalantly eating goat cheese and figs. The bird averaged flying 56 miles an hour for 24 hours. Until that day, no one knew falcons had such range. The first records of bird banding in North America are those of John J. Audubon, the famous American naturalist and painter, in 1803.

  Birth Control Pill

  The first birth control pill, Enovid, was introduced in 1960 by G.D. Searle and Company. It came in two doses, 5 and 10 milligrams, and was delivered in a small bottle, much like all pill prescriptions of that time. Birth control pills were offered for approval to the Food and Drug Administration in 1957 as a means to treat menstrual disorders and infertility. It wasn’t until 1960 that the manufacturer submitted the same oral contraceptive (Enovid) for approval to prevent conception and unwanted pregnancies. The first pill, G.D. Searle and Company’s Enovid-10, contained 9.85 milligrams of the progestational hormone norethynodrel and 150 micrograms of the estrogenic hormone mestranol. That’s about 10 times the progestin and 4 times the estrogen contained in today’s birth control pills.

  Black Hole Discovered

  In the summer of 1972, the first object to be generally recognized as a black hole was discovered by 28-year-old Charles Thomas Bolton, a part-time faculty member at the University of Toronto, Canada. While observing a couple binary stars (two stars that orbit each other), he made his discovery. The black hole in question was the x-ray binary star Cygnus X-1, whose companion was HDE 226868. Bolton detected Cygnus X-1’s presence at the center of the Milky Way by observing star HDE 226868 wobble as it orbited around a massive but collapsing “invisible star” (Cygnus X-1). He also observed the appearance of a stream of gas flowing from the star to Cygnus X-1, swirling around it at incredible speeds before vanishing. In 1967, John Wheeler, an American theoretical physicist, first applied the term black hole to these collapsing objects whose gravitational field is so intense that no electromagnetic radiation can escape, not even light.

  Blockbuster Film

  The term blockbuster probably stemmed from the crowds of people that flocked to see the premiere of The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, on February 8, 1915, in Los Angeles, California. The huge crowds formed long lines around the block to get tickets. Based on two novels by Thomas F. Dixon Jr., the film was a 3-hour silent epic about the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. Griffith used innovative editing and production techniques to create an unprecedented display of visual, thought-provoking entertainment. Blockbuster crowds came to see the film, making it the biggest money earner in film history until 1937, when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs claimed that title.

  Blood Bank

  In 1933, Soviet physician Sergey Yudin tried blood storage using cadaver blood at the Sklifosovsky Institute in Moscow. But it was on March 15, 1937, at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, that the first blood bank to preserve blood for future use in transfusions was established. Bernard Fantus, director of therapeutics at the hospital, formulated a hospital laboratory that could preserve and store live donor blood and coined the term blood bank to describe it. Fantus had seen a need for blood storage to avoid transfusions having to go direct from donor to patient. Physicians had seen the effectiveness of transfusion therapy on the front lines of war and wanted blood available for treatment of their patients. The blood bank filled that lifesaving need.

  In 1940, American Dr. Charles Drew was a pioneer in blood plasma preservation and organized the world’s first blood bank drive, nicknamed “Blood for Britain.” He also established the first American Red Cross blood bank.

  Blood Transfusion

  From the 1300s, the Incas of Peru regularly practiced blood transfusions centuries before the Europeans invaded their land. In their ancient engraved records, the Ica Stones of Peru show evidence of blood vessels being connected from one human to another via crude tubes (hollowed-out reeds). The Incas understood the life forces of blood and that a lack of blood meant certain death. The Incas’ crude live donor blood transfusions would have had minimal problems from incompatibility. Most all the South American Incas had the same blood type—O-positive, same as all the indigenous peoples of the Andean region during that time.

  Blue Jeans

  In 1853, the first blue jeans came into existence through the ingenuity of Levi Strauss. Strauss was a 24-year-old German immigrant who left New York for San Francisco with a small supply of dry goods to open a makeshift shop during the California gold rush. Shortly after setting up, a prospector asked Strauss what he was selling. Strauss told him he had rough canvas to use for tents and wagon covers. Story has it that the prospector told him he should have brought pants because there weren’t any strong enough. Immediately, Strauss had the canvas made into waist overalls, which the gold miners liked, except they complained that the overalls tended to chafe. Strauss substituted a twilled cloth from France called serge de Nimes that later became known as denim. The pants were nicknamed blue jeans.

  Bourbon Whiskey

  In 1783, Evan Williams established the first commercial distillery, Old Evan Williams Distillery, to produce bourbon whiskey in the Commonwealth of Kentucky on the east side of what later became 5th Street in Louisville. Although others were individually concocting their own versions of bourbon whiskey, Williams took a professional approach to emphasize quality. A premium whiskey was his means to better the competition that would inevitably follow. Mother Nature smiled gracefully upon his efforts, too. The limestone water in the area used in the distilling process conveyed a particularly desirable taste for his product.

  Bowling Alley

  A “bowling alley” has recently been discovered in Al-Fayyoum gov ernorate, south of Cairo, Egypt, dating from around 200 B.C.
E. of the Ptolemaic Period. An Italian team unearthed a unique open structure in the area of Madi City (an ancient temple). Its smooth floor is composed of a single large block of limestone with a groove 4 inches deep and 8 inches wide. In the middle of the lane’s floor there’s a 5-inch-square hole. Two balls of polished limestone were found, one of which fits the groove while the other fits the square hole. This first bowling track is like no other discovered from the ancient world and was found next to the remains of a number of houses, each made of two rooms with a large hall. After considerable study, it’s been proposed that this was the first attempt at the practice of bowling down an alley.

  Box Spring

  Very little is substantiated about the box springs first manufactured in France during the early to mid-1800s. On record, the first box spring to be imported to the United States from France was in 1857 by James Boyle of Chatham Square in New York City. He was a manufacturer of bedding who recognized the need for box springs to make mattresses less lumpy. These first box springs were about 12 inches deep and reversible. Their frames were made of lumber with spiral springs in eight sections joined together with strips of ticking. Twine also helped secure it all together. All-metal box springs came later, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that box springs enjoyed wide use.

  Boxing World Champ

  On August 29, 1885, John L. Sullivan of Roxbury, Massachusetts, outpointed Dominic McCaffrey of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in Chester Park, Cincinnati, Ohio. The boxing bout was promoted “to decide the Marquess of Queensberry glove contest for the championship of the world,” according to press at the time, and was boxing’s first “heavyweight” title fight with 3-ounce gloves and 3-minute rounds. Sullivan weighed in at 205 pounds to McCaffrey’s 160. Sullivan was 5’10¼“ tall; McCaffrey was 5’8½”. By aggressively throwing more punches and scoring the most points, Sullivan won a six-round decision. (Some say the bout went seven rounds, as the referee had lost count.) Nicknamed the “Boston Strongboy,” Sullivan was the first American sports hero to become a national celebrity. He was also the first American athlete to earn more than $1 million.

  Braille Encoding

  Approximately 500 years before Frenchman Louis Braille devised his encoding system in 1821, a Syrian Muslim created his own method of reading by touching raised letters of the alphabet, very similar to what Braille would later develop. In the fourteenth century, Zain-Din al Amidi was a blind scholar and distinguished professor at the University of Moustansiryeh in what is now Iraq. Although he went blind soon after his birth, he later improvised a method by which he identified his books and made notes to express to others. Zain-Din al Amidi was the first to utilize “touch reading,” and used it to educate himself in law and foreign languages.

  Brassiere

  Around 2500 B.C.E., warrior Minoan women on the Greek isle of Crete began wearing and using a garment resembling a bra. It shoved their bare breasts upward and exposed them from their clothing. Hundreds of years later, the ancient Roman and Greek women strapped on a breast band to reduce their bust size. In 1907, the word brassiere was first reported in a copy of American Vogue magazine. The term came from the old French word for “upper arm” and appeared for the first time in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1912.

  New York City socialite Mary Phelps Jacob devised the first modern bra with two handkerchiefs and some help from her maid. She earned a patent on November 3, 1914.

  Breakfast Cereal

  In 1863, Dr. James C. Jackson of Dansville, New York, a follower of Sylvester Graham (of graham cracker fame), developed the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal. Granula, as Jackson called it, was graham flour dough baked into dry loaves, broken into chunks, baked again, and then ground into still smaller pieces. But it was far from convenient like today’s breakfast cereals. It had to be soaked overnight before it was possible to chew the dense, bran-heavy nuggets.

  In 1887, the next generation of breakfast cereals caught on when John Harvey Kellogg, operator of the Battle Creek (Michigan) Sanatorium, invented a ground wheat, oat, and cornmeal biscuit for his patients suffering from bowel problems. Kellogg initially called his cereal Granula but later changed the name to Granola after a lawsuit. His brother Will Kellogg later invented corn flakes and went on to found the Kellogg Company in 1906. By the 1930s, Kellogg’s had invented the first puffed cereal and soon afterward introduced shredded cereal.

  Breaking the Sound Barrier

  In 1934, the first rocket of notable record broke the sound barrier. The ARS-4 was launched by the American Rocket Society from Marine Park, Staten Island, New York, on September 9, 1934. The unmanned rocket had a single thrust chamber with four angled nozzles. Its flight reached a speed over 700 miles per hour, a height of 400 feet, and a horizontal range of 1,600 feet. The ARS-4 rocket ended up in New York Bay. The American Rocket Society, originally founded on April 4, 1930, as the American Interplanetary Society, was a pioneer in designing and testing liquid-fuelled rockets and trail-blazed the path to the U.S. space program.

  Brick

  The first known bricks date to 7500 B.C.E. early Mesopotamia and were made from sun-dried clay mud in the Upper Tigris area of southeastern Turkey. Clay from deposits around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was mixed with straw, shaped into individual bricklike units, and sun-dried (similar to the way kids make mud pies). These first mud bricks did not stand up to the tough weather conditions and were in constant need of repair when used to construct primitive shelter. The first fired (cooked or heated) bricks were produced in the third millennium B.C.E. in Neolithic Jericho and were a much better product. The fired bricks meant more permanent buildings could be constructed in areas with high rainfall or with cold or very hot weather.

  Broadway Musical

  The earliest American musical for which a complete score and libretto survived was The Archers, also called The Mountaineers of Switzerland. It premiered in New York City on April 18, 1796, and ran for three performances at the John Street Theatre, east of Broadway. The Archers was a comic opera by librettist William Dunlap and composer Benjamin Carr. The musical was adapted from Friedrich von Schiller’s William Tell legend and contrasted ideas of liberty and anarchy. It followed its initial three-performance run with two nights in Boston.

  Bubble Gum

  In 1928, the first marketable bubble gum was invented by 23-year-old Walter E. Diemer, an accountant with the Fleer chewing gum company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Diemer spent his spare time playing around with new gum recipes and explained, in a 1996 interview with the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, “I was doing something else and ended up with something with bubbles.” Pink was the one and only shade of food coloring he had nearby, so his new bubble gum became pink. It was less sticky than regular chewing gum and also stretched more easily. Diemer carried a 5-pound glop of his new gum to a grocery store and conducted demonstrations. It sold out in a single afternoon, and before long, the Fleer chewing gum company was marketing and selling Diemer’s creation, calling it Dubble Bubble.

  Buddhist Monastery

  Around 500 B.C.E., King Bimbisara of Magadha in India donated the great Veluvana Garden as a monastic dwelling to the future Buddha and the Order of Sangha. The Buddha humbly accepted the bamboo grove park because he wanted a residence that was secluded and quiet and not too far—nor too close—to the city. King Bimbisara was the Buddha’s first Royal Patron, and it’s said that as the king poured donation water for the facility, the earth quaked as if the main roots of Buddha’s teachings had rooted into the ground. Even though the Buddha’s new residence was known as Veluvanarama (arama is used to denote a monastery), there were no permanent buildings. The Buddha and his monks resided under the shelter of the trees for 6 years during the rainy season before moving elsewhere.

  Bungee Jump

  Around 1000 C.E., the first bungee jump was performed on Pentecost Island in the Pacific Archipelago of Vanuatu. A man called Tamalie in the village Bunlap had a quarrel with his wife. She ran away, climbed a tall Banyan
tree, and wrapped her ankles with liana vines. Tamalie followed her up the tree. The woman jumped and survived because of the vines tied to her ankles. The man also jumped, not knowing what his wife had done. He died, and the men of Bunlap were very impressed by his performance. Thereafter, the jump transformed into an ongoing death-defying religious ritual called naghol, or “land diving,” that inspired modern-day bungee jumping.

  Burger Chain

  In 1921, White Castle became the United States’ first hamburger chain when Billy Ingram, a real estate businessman, and Walter Anderson, the man who first flattened hamburger into a patty with a spatula and grilled it on a bed of shredded onions, formed a partnership. With $700 borrowed money, the first White Castle opened in Wichita, Kansas, offering hamburgers at 5¢ apiece. The hamburger was considered low-class food before White Castle changed the public’s mind through targeted ad campaigns. One PR initiative was printed coupons offering 5 White Castles (what the burgers were called) for 10¢. It also helped that the customers could watch the burgers being made. Ingram and Anderson came up with the 5-hole concept of burger-making to ensure the burgers were thoroughly cooked. In 1961, White Castle was the first chain to sell a billion hamburgers. White Castle’s other firsts included the industrial-strength spatula, the mass-produced paper hat, and a marketing slogan for fast food; White Castle’s was “Buy ’em by the sack.” The founders of White Castle created a market demand for burgers and started many of the concepts still used in the fast-food industry today.