Firsts (15 page)

Around 400 B.C.E., the first kites were called
Muyuan
. These early Chinese kites were made of lightweight woods for support and structure and had thin wooden sheets as facings and walls. The first kites were aerodynamic, relatively large, and had the power to lift several pounds. They were held together by twined knots and natural epoxy resins and were flown and guided while attached to cords or flexible wooden rods. Hand-painted designs and scenes were common decorations. The kites were used for many varied purposes such as communicating with the gods, divination, funerals, distractions to enemies, and even for fishing.

In 1968, the first concept of a laptop computer was the Dynabook, created by Alan Kay of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California. Kay’s vision was a notebook-size wireless portable computer actually for children more than for adults. The Dynabook never got past sketches and a cardboard model, but in 1972, Kay’s ideas did lead to the development of the Xerox Alto prototype. It was called the Interim Dynabook, but the project never went much further except to set the tone for the development of a truly portable laptop computer in the future.

Introduced in 1982, the GRiD Compass 1100 was likely the first commercial computer created in a laptop format and one of the first truly portable machines.

On July 7, 1960, Theodore Harold Maiman, a Hughes Aircraft Company researcher in Malibu, California, first demonstrated the working laser beam in public. Maiman’s ruby laser was the first successful optical or light laser. It was based on the evolving works of Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow who, in 1954, had invented the “maser” (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) using ammonia gas and microwave radiation.
Laser
is an acronym for “light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.”

In 1894, 5 years after Johns Hopkins Hospital opened in Baltimore, Maryland, William Stewart Halsted, the hospital’s first surgeon-in-chief, developed and introduced the first rubber surgical gloves. Although Halsted may not have invented the surgical glove, he introduced the sterile latex reusable glove into the operating room after he realized latex was an effective substance to provide a barrier to prevent infections. Many consider Halsted “the father of the surgical glove.”

On April 18, 1934, J. F. Cantrell opened the first Laundromat in Fort Worth, Texas. Cantrell noticed that personal washing machines were a luxury many of his neighbors simply could not afford, so he got a great idea and filled a needed niche. His first Laundromat, which he called Washateria, had four electric washing machines but no dryers. The washers were not coin-operated; Cantrell charged by the hour for the use of each machine. Patrons brought their own soap.

Edwin Beard Budding, a textile engineer from Stroud, Gloucestershire, England, invented the first lawnmower in 1830. It was a mechanical push-type mower made of cast iron and featured gear wheels that transmitted power from the rear roller to the cutting cylinder. Budding based his idea on a device used for trimming the nap on cloth, but he had to figure out how the mechanism could be mounted in a wheeled frame to make the blades rotate close to a lawn’s surface. He did, and his concept worked. Budding patented the idea and went into a production partnership with another local engineer, John Ferrabee of Phoenix Iron Works.

In October 1939, unscrupulous physicians in Nazi Germany conducted the first lethal injections, working under a program called Action T4 that eventually caused the deaths of about 275,000 innocent people. The physicians were exterminating patients under direction of Adolf Hitler’s secret memo of September 1, 1939, indicating that suffering patients “judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination that may appear incurable” should be killed with a liquid mixture of psychoactive drugs, mainly sedatives from the barbiturates family. Action T4 was later replaced with poison gas showers.

On December 7, 1982, Charles “Charlie” Brooks Jr. of Fort Worth, Texas, was the first convict to be killed by lethal injection after being injected with sodium pentathol.

The first mention of a method for detecting lies was by British novelist Daniel DeFoe in a 1730 essay he wrote titled “An Effectual Scheme for the Immediate Preventing of Street Robberies and Suppressing All Other Disorders of the Night.” He suggested that taking the pulse of a suspicious fellow was a practical and humane method of identifying a criminal because a fast pulse indicated suspicion of guilt. DeFoe’s was the earliest suggestion of a method to employ medical science in the fight against crime.

Around 285 B.C.E., the people of the Pharos peninsula in Alexandria, Egypt, marked the harbor, creating the world’s first marine lighthouse. The project, later hailed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was engineered by Sostratus of Cnidus. The 350-foot-high lighthouse took many years to build and was constructed in three stages: square, octagonal, and circular. Access to its entrance was up a long, vaulted ramp. A spiral staircase led up to the many chambers that provided pathways to the third story, where a fire burned on the summit. This first lighthouse stood until the mid-fourteenth century, when it was destroyed by an earthquake.

Around 1730, the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia, was topped with the first lightning rod. Russian architects devised it along with the tower’s other advanced technologies. The roof of the tower was crowned with a metallic rod in the shape of a pointed gilded sphere with spikes. Several wired cables ran from the rod down the sides of the tower into the ground. This successfully protected the tower by taking lightning strikes away from the structure and into the ground.

On May 23, 1962, Dr. Ronald A. Malt, a Boston, Massachusetts, surgeon, along with a team of 12 specialists, oversaw the first successful reattachment of a human limb, the right arm of 12-year-old Everett Knowles. The youngster had been hopping a freight train to go to a baseball game and was thrown against a stone abutment, which caused his arm to be ripped off cleanly at the shoulder. The surgery was conducted at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and a year later, the boy was able to move all five fingers and bend his wrist. Two years afterward, he was playing baseball and tennis.
Life
magazine called it “the most celebrated arm in all the world.”

William Sheppard of New York City patented liquid soap on August 22, 1865. Patent number 49561 depicted his discovery “that by the addition of comparatively small quantities of common soap to a large quantity of spirits of ammonia or hartshorn is thickened to the consistency of molasses, and a liquid soap is obtained of superior detergent qualities.” Sheppard dissolved the soap in liquid form in water or by steam to the consistency of molasses. Then he mixed 1 pound of regular soap with 100 pounds of spirits of hartshorn (the ammoniacal liquor resulting from distilling horn shavings). This first liquid soap soon became useful for both domestic and manufacturing purposes.

The first literary agent, someone who acts on the behalf of a client, was Alexander Pollock Watt, of Aberdeen, Scotland. In 1875, Watt established A. P. Watt and Company, Limited, the world’s first literary agency, after a friend asked him to negotiate a contract with a London publishing company. Watt defined and set the standard for the role of the literary agent, developing strong friendships with the authors he represented. His son, A. S. Watt, took over the literary agency after his father’s death in 1914. The agency, which is still operating and headquartered in London today, attracted many important authors, among them Pearl Buck, W. Somerset Maugham, Mark Twain, William Butler Keats, Herbert George Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, and others.

In 1939, Carl E. Stotz of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, founded Little League Baseball. The first game was played on a vacant lot after Stotz enlisted help from others in his community. Three teams of boys under age 13 were formed—Lundy Lumber, Lycoming Dairy, and Jumbo Pretzel. A $30 donation was sufficient to purchase uniforms for each of the three teams whose managers were Stotz, George Bebble, and Bert Bebble. In that first-ever Little League game, Lundy Lumber defeated Lycoming Dairy 23-8, but Lycoming Dairy came back to win the season’s first-half title. They faced second-half champ Lundy Lumber in a best-of-three series. Lycoming Dairy won the final game of the series by the score of 3-2.

The first log cabin dates to long, long ago. The technique of building with horizontally laid logs joined at the corners with specially carved notches is an old European tradition brought to the New World in the 1600s. Swedish immigrants constructed America’s first log cabins in 1638 when they built the town of New Sweden (near present-day Trenton, New Jersey). These early cabins were small, one-room buildings that measured 12×14 feet or so that housed an entire family. They usually had a fireplace at one end and sleeping quarters in a loft.

Aside from biblical references to drawing lots, the first public lottery of note with cash prizes took place in 1530 in Florence, Italy. Called
La Lotto de Firenze,
this game of chance was a number lottery that awarded money to its winners. The concept was the expanded idea of a 1515 custom in Genoa, Italy, in which names were randomly drawn for election to the Senate. For the 1530 notion, the names were changed to plain numbers. The word
lottery
is derived from the Italian word
lotto,
meaning “destiny” or “fate.”

On April 14, 1874, the first loudspeaker was described in a U.S. patent by Ernst W. Siemens of Berlin, Germany. His improved magneto-electric induction apparatus, in which a magnet excites electric currents, applied the mechanical movement of an electrical coil from the electrical currents transmitted through it. However, initially he did not use the device for audible magnification transmissions. After making some adaptations, he was later granted German and British patents for his sound radiator of a moving-coil transducer with a flaring morning glory (flowerlike) trumpet form. Siemens’s device later became the loudspeaker horn used on most phonographs players.

In 1744, American Benjamin Franklin produced and printed the first mail-order catalog to sell scientific and academic books. The catalog also came with the first mail-order guarantee: “Those persons who live remote, by sending their orders and money to B. Franklin (in Philadelphia) may depend on the same justice as if present.” In 2004, Franklin was inducted into the Direct Marketing Association’s Hall of Fame.

In 1870, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriez from Provence, France, created margarine in response to a request by Emperor Louis Napoleon III for a satisfactory butter substitute. Mège-Mouriez used margaric acid, a fatty acid component isolated in 1813 by Michael Chevreul and named because of the lustrous pearly drops that reminded Chevreul of the Greek word for pearl,
margarites.
From this word, Mège-Mouriez coined the name
margarine
for his invention, the invention that later claimed the emperor’s prize.

The first paper matchbook folder, called Flexibles, was patented in September 1882 by Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, patent attorney Joshua Pusey. Pusey had become frustrated with carrying around bulky boxes of wooden matches to keep lighting his cigars, so he created a device made up of lighter, smaller paper matches that were secured to a thin paper wrapping with an attached striking surface. This first matchbook contained 50 paper matches and positioned the striking surface on the inside of the paper fold. In 1896, Pusey sold his invention to the Diamond Match Company for $4,000.

In 1660 in France, during the Baroque Period and onward, the Adrienne was a gownlike garment with no waist and lots of voluminous folds to cover a growing body, specifically a pregnant body. It fit loosely, but it did try to follow the shape of the female figure. Previously in history, there was no need for specialized maternity wear because all dresses were big and loose-fitting. The French-fashioned Adrienne took over the leading role for maternity fashion in Europe, and the rest of world followed.

In the ninth century, Almum et Hippocraticum Medicorum Collegium, located in Salerno, near Naples in southern Italy, became the first modern medical school. Although founded in the ninth century, it was formally organized in the tenth century and reached its peak at the end of the twelfth century. The most famous teacher at the school was Constantine Africanus from Carthage, North Africa, who taught there in the eleventh century. For students to earn licensure, they had to work through 3 years of college work, 4 years of medical study, 1 year of practice with a physician, and another year of anatomy for surgery. The Salerno school is still in operation today.