Firsts (11 page)

On January 5, 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross was sworn in as governor of Wyoming. She was elected on November 4, 1924, and was preceded in office by her late husband William B. Ross. Mr. Ross died from complications from an appendectomy on October 4, 1924, after about a year and a half in office. In the month after his death, the Democratic Party nominated his wife to run for governor in a special election. Nellie Tayloe Ross refused to campaign, but she easily won the race to become the first woman governor in the history of the United States. She narrowly lost her bid for reelection in 1926.

Around 1200 B.C.E., Deborah, wife of Lappidoth, became the first female judge. She was a Judge of Israel for 40 years during a time when judges ruled instead of kings. The Israelites came to her to decide their disputes, and she held court outdoors in Ephraim in a place called Deborah’s Palm Tree. Deborah was a prophetess, judge, and military leader all in one. The accounts of Deborah are found in the Bible in Judges chapters 4 and 5.

The first female Nobel Prize winner, Polish-French physicist Marie Curie, shared her 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie. The three were given the award “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena.” The award was split up, one half to Henri Becquerel, one fourth to Pierre Curie, and one fourth to Marie Curie. In 1911, Marie Curie also became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first woman to be the sole winner of a Nobel Prize, and the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice.

The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri, was the first Olympics to officially award gold medals, and it was there that American Matilda Scott Howell became the first female gold medal recipient. She won for women’s archery. In September 1904, the 44-year-old archer from Ohio won 3 gold medals for the events of Double National Round, Double Columbia Round, and Women’s Team Round. Of the 651 athletes who competed in this Olympics, only 6 were women.

The 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, was the first Olympics in which women could compete, and it was there that Charlotte Reinagle Cooper became the first woman to win an Olympic individual champion title by capturing the women’s tennis singles championship. Cooper, born in Ealing, Middlesex, England, wore an ankle-length dress in accordance with proper Victorian attire while she was playing, and she followed her singles victory by also winning the mixed doubles championship with partner Reginald Doherty. She didn’t win a medal, though. Those weren’t awarded until the 1904 Summer Olympics.

Around 1552, the first female professional artist was Sofonisba Anguissola. She was an Italian Renaissance painter who was praised by Michelangelo himself for her drawing ability. Anguissola’s self-portraits and family paintings earned her royal endorsements from the aristocracy of Milan, Mantua, Parma, and others. In 1559, she was invited to Spain to become a court portraitist for Philip II. Anguissola was also the first important woman artist of the Renaissance and the first female painter to enjoy an international reputation.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mrs. Harry Johnson, whose first name was never recorded, was the first female sports announcer. She was heard over the radio in Omaha, Nebraska, accompanying her husband, who was the sports announcer for Central States Broadcasting. During the broadcasts of local high school sporting events, Mrs. Johnson provided insightful color commentary. She filled in airtime during lags in the sporting action and also helped keep statistics of the game to make a better sports broadcast. She and her husband made a great on-air team.

In 1965, the San Diego, California-born Donna de Varona became the first female network sports announcer in television history when she signed a contract with ABC’s
Wide World of Sports.
As a former Olympic athlete and champion, de Varona parlayed her sporting experience into broadcasting and traveled all over, temporarily filling in when regular anchormen became ill or went on vacation.

On September 25, 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor (born 1930) joined the U.S. Supreme Court as its 102nd justice and its first female judge. President Ronald Reagan had announced earlier, on July 7, 1981, that O’Connor was his appointee to fill a court vacancy. O’Connor was confirmed by a Judiciary Committee vote of 17 to 1 and won approval by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 99 to 0. She made it clear that the high court’s role was to interpret the law, not to legislate. O’Connor served as an Associate Justice for more than 24 years until the swearing in of her replacement on January 31, 2006.

In 1893, the world’s first Ferris wheel was built for the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bridge builder George Washington Gale Ferris, who was greatly knowledgeable in structural steel, invented the amusement ride. The first Ferris wheel stood about 265 feet tall, weighed 1,200 tons, carried 36 cars, seated about 1,500 passengers, and sported 3,000 electric lights. It was an awe-some display that was powered by two 1,000-horsepower engines. With its construction costs being roughly $400,000, Ferris’s wheel certainly accomplished what the Chicago fair organizers wanted—something to rival the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.

The Vickers F. B. 5 Gunbus was the first fighter plane. It was a two seater bi-plane (two wings on each side) developed by the British Vickers company in 1914. As an experimental gun carrier, it had sufficient lift to carry a machine gun and its operator as well as the pilot. The gunner could fire the machine gun in a tiny forward compartment. Although this aircraft lacked speed, it was put into service over France in early 1915 during World War I.

On June 11, 1790, at Federal Hall in New York City, the first filibuster for the purpose of delaying legislative action occurred in the U.S. House of Representatives. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and William Loughton Smith of South Carolina both made long speeches during that first U.S. Congress meeting. The resolution on the table was regarding the search for a permanent location for the federal government.

In February 1637, during the Dutch Golden Age, Dutch tulip contracts sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. During this period, contract prices for bulbs of a newly introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed. This economic rise and fall is generally considered the first recorded financial bubble, sometimes referred to as a speculative bubble, a market bubble, or a price bubble. “Tulip mania” is still often used to refer to a large economic bubble.

Aside from prints found on ancient fossilized clay tablets, the first fingerprints used for identification purposes date from around 1859. William Herschel, a British magistrate at Jungipoor in colonial India, required that on any official papers, the “signers” had to add their palm and fingerprints for identification purposes. He is also responsible for the idea of police recording and using fingerprint records to catch repeat offenders. Herschel also collaborated with scientist Francis Galton to establish the first fingerprint classification system, which was implemented by Scotland Yard.

In 1722, German Zachary Greyl invented the first fire extinguishing machine and successfully demonstrated it in Paris, France, to the Secretary-at-War and others of influence. The device worked by suffocating out a fire. It consisted of a wooden vessel holding a considerable quantity of water. In its center was a fixed tube of gunpowder attached to a fuse. During a fire, the device was quickly wheeled into the flaming room or building and then the fuse to the gunpowder was lit. The resulting explosion was so forceful that it pushed the water into all parts of the room and extinguished most of the major flames.

In the seventh century,
Greek fire
(a term coined later by western European crusaders in the thirteenth century) was projected upon enemy forces in the fashion of a modern flamethrower. The Greek fire was a weapon the Byzantines employed that was instrumental in saving Constantinople from invasions by Muslim fleets. Although previous incendiary weapons had existed, Greek fire was discharged from bronze tubes mounted on the prows of Byzantine ships. These first flamethrow ers emitted a thunderous noise as they discharged. They were insidious, and the flaming discharge adhered to whatever it struck and couldn’t be extinguished with water. The exact nature of Greek fire was a state secret known only to a small circle of Byzantine elites.

In 1578, Mark Scaliot, a blacksmith and locksmith in London, England, exhibited the world’s first flea performance to the London public. Scaliot skillfully devised a miniature lock of iron, steel, and brass composed of several pieces, including a pipe key. Along with it he fastened a very small 43-link chain of gold. All the items together weighed about
¹
⁄10 gram. Scaliot put the device around the neck of a flea, and the flea pulled it with ease. From this demonstration of Scaliot’s great craftsmanship, the “flea circus” had begun. Scaliot went on to expand this flea circus with more acts.

In 1901, American inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt patented the first mercury vapor lamp, the prototype for today’s fluorescent lamp. Hewitt, who built upon the work of the nineteenth-century German physicist Julius Plucker and glassblower Heinrich Geissler, found that by passing an electric current through a glass tube containing tiny amounts of mercury, a bluish-green light was emitted. Exciting the mercury vapor created luminescence. Hewitt and George Westinghouse, another prolific inventor, formed Cooper Hewitt Electric Company in New York City to produce the first commercial fluorescent lamps for photographic studios and industrial use.

Around 500 B.C.E., the Macedonians in the northernmost part of ancient Greece were perhaps the world’s first fly fishermen. Their fishing was written about in the first century C.E. by Latin poet Marcus Valerius Martialis and in 200 C.E. by Roman author Claudius Aelianus. These authors wrote of people fishing in a river with a handmade fly. Aelianus described how the ancient Macedonians attached red wool and feathers to a hook. Their fishing rods (lacquered, sticklike poles) were about 6 feet long, which was the same length of the string attached with a snaring fly at the end.

On January 7, 1862, John N. Balsley of Dayton, Ohio, patented the first folding stepladder. It was a wooden six-step device with an A-shape frame that could be folded or closed in behind the steps. (The steps themselves did not fold.) Balsley was a carpenter and inventor who replaced the typical ladder rungs with steps and attached the A-shape frame. The A-shape support behind the steps had a much wider base than the width of the steps, which provided stability. Previous to Balsley’s invention, steplad ders were not foldable for storage or ease of transporting.

The food processor is the brainchild of Pierre Verdan, a salesman in the early 1960s for a French catering company. Verdan noticed his commercial clients were spending a lot of time in the kitchen chopping, shredding, and mixing. His solution was a bowl with a revolving blade inside the base. In 1960, Verdan established Robot Coupe, a company to manufacture the first food processors, powered by industrial induction motors, for the catering industry. The food processor was not introduced to the domestic market until the 1970s.

On May 14, 1874, the first football goalposts were at Jarvis Field in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a contest that pitted McGill University of Montreal against Harvard in a game of rugby football under Harvard rules. The goalposts were H-shape, constructed with two wooden upright posts, with a crossbar connecting them. The exact dimensions of these first goalposts are not well documented, but there was one goalpost at each end of the playing field. The game was also the first international rugby football contest as well as the first instance of an admission fee charged at a collegiate sporting event.

In the 1893 Army-Navy football game, Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves (who would later be named “the father of carrier aviation”) wore the first football helmet. It had been created by an Annapolis, Maryland, shoemaker after Reeves’s navy doctor advised him that he risked death or “instant insanity” if he took another kick to the head. That first flimsy helmet with earflaps was crudely made of moleskin, but Reeves figured something on his head as protection was better than nothing. This helmet also served as the basis for early aviator caps.