Firsts (21 page)

In 1960, American astronomer Dr. Allan Rex Sandage made the first optical identification of a quasar, an extremely old and distant celestial object whose power output is several thousand times that of our entire galaxy. Assisted by his junior colleague, Thomas A. Matthews, at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories in Palomar, California, Sandage recorded strong radio emissions generating from a localized direction in the sky that coincided with the position of a distant starlike object. This first identified quasar was located in the constellation Virgo. Describing the new object, Sandage probably coined the term
quasar
for “quasi-stellar radio source,” although some say the term wasn’t coined until 1964 in a
Physics Today
article by Chinese-born U.S. astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu.

On May 18, 1904, the first public demonstration of radar took place at the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, Germany. The radar had been invented by a young engineer named Christian Huelsmeyer. His telemobiloscope was a transmitter-receiver system for detecting distant metallic objects by means of electrical waves. It worked well as an anticollision device for ships. During the first demonstration, one could hear a bell ringing as a ship approached on the river. The ringing only stopped when the vessel changed direction or moved out of range of the invisible beam generated from a wooden box placed onboard. The device could detect ships up to 3,000 meters away. Although it worked flawlessly, it aroused no major interest at the time.

Most consider Guglielmo Marconi the father of modern radio, but as early as 1892, Nikola Tesla, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Yugoslavia living in New York City, created the first basic radio design that worked. Tesla discovered that he could transmit and receive powerful radio signals via his newly developed coils when they were tuned to resonate at the same frequency. Utilizing his Tesla coils in early 1895, he was ready to transmit a signal 50 miles away, but a disastrous fire struck and destroyed his lab. Only a few months after his death in 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited Nikola Tesla as being the inventor of the first radio.

In 1897, Guglielmo Marconi established the world’s first radio station at the Needles battery on the western tip of the Isle of Wight, England. Marconi made most of his early experiments along the beautiful but deserted stretch of coastline because the area provided open water straight to the mainland, the optimum range of his equipment. Marconi’s first radio station transmitted to two hired ferryboats and to another station in Bournemouth. The receivers did not take delivery of voice nor music, but instead received buzzing sounds created by a spark gap transmitter attempting to send a signal by Morse code.

In Germany as early as 1550, the first railroads with raised rails, called wagon ways, were in use. (Earlier, around 600 B.C.E., the Greeks had wheeled vehicles that ran in grooves of limestone or in cut-stone tracks, although these weren’t considered railroads.) The German wagon ways had tracks above or on top of the ground. These roads of rails were primitive and always in need of repair because the rails were constructed of wood. However, they did provide greater ease of movement than dirt roads and were used to transport tubs of ore to and from mines. Wagons or carts with special-made wheels were placed on the wooden rails and pulled by horses or pushed by men. These early wagon ways were the predecessors of the modern railroads.

In 1690, the first paper mill was established in the U.S. colonies, and with it, the first instance of paper recycling. The Rittenhouse Mill was founded near Germantown, Pennsylvania, by papermaker William Rittenhouse, printer William Bradford, and two wealthy Philadelphia businessmen. The mill made pressed paper from recycled waste paper and discarded rags. Thanks to an ever-increasing demand for books and writing material, older books were often bought, many times at auction, for the purpose of recycling the old paper into new paper.

In 1663, Scottish astronomer James Gregory came up with the design for a reflecting telescope, but it was Englishman Sir Isaac Newton who constructed the first practical reflecting telescope around 1668. Newton’s design added a smaller diagonal mirror near the primary mirror’s focus to reflect the image at a 90-degree angle. The user then could view the image without obstructing the incoming light. Newton donated the first reflecting telescope to the Royal Society of London around 1671.

Although scores of inventors contributed many small advances in cooling machinery, it was 1834 when an American inventor obtained the first patent for a refrigerating machine. Jacob Perkins, who was living and working in Great Britain at the time, actually built a prototype system that worked. This first refrigerator, housed in a wooden cabinet and about the size of modern refrigerators, used ether in a vapor-compression cycle. Perkins proved that vapors or gases may be liquefied when subjected to high pressure, and that led to cooling. His refrigerating machine could make artificial ice, although it really never gathered much interest because there was already a well-established natural ice industry.

Patented in 1860, the Henry rifle gave one man the single power of a dozen marksmen. It was the first successful repeating rifle and later evolved into the famous Winchester line. The .44 caliber rimfire, lever-action, breech-loading repeating Henry rifle was conceived by American Benjamin Tyler Henry and produced in a plant in New Haven, Connecticut. His rifle was the first of the practical (as in small enough to carry comfortably), truly rapid-fire small arms. The Henry also played an important role during the Civil War’s western theater.

The first republic,
Res Publica
(public matter), was a Roman republic founded around 509 B.C.E. at the time Rome was governed as a republic during the epoch between the Roman Kingdom and the Roman Empire. This era began after the overthrow of the Roman king of the Tarquin monarchy. The Roman Senate was already in place but was now supplemented by two annually elected magistrates and military leaders, called consuls, of which Lucius Junius Brutus was the first, that performed executive duties. This new Roman republic centered on the principles of a separation of powers and checks and balances. San Marino, founded in 301 C.E., bills itself as the oldest surviving constitutional republic in the world.

In 1765, the first restaurant to be called by that name was the Champ d’Oiseau in Paris, France. Tavern keeper Monsieur Boulanger opened this first restaurant and kept it centered on food, not alcohol, coffee, or tea. The bill of fare included sheep’s feet simmered in a white sauce, soup, and broth. Over the door Boulanger advertised these dishes as
restaurants
(restoratives) and claimed they restored one’s health. Customers came to the restaurant primarily to eat, which was a novelty of the era, as most ate their meals at home or at an inn if on an overnight stay.

The first known revolver was a 1597 revolving arquebus. It was produced by Hans Stopler of Nuremberg, Germany, whose design was an improvement on an ill-fated Venetian matchlock version that dated to the 1540s. An arquebus was a sort of premusket handgun that fired by applying a burning match to a trigger. It used a snaphaunce lock, an early flintlock mechanism for igniting a charge of gunpowder. Its main problem was the loss of gas due to ill-fitting parts; this routinely caused stray sparks from the chamber being fired to find their way to other chambers, often with disastrous results, such as blowing up in the shooter’s hand or face. The chamber was manually turned or revolved in preparation for the next firing, provided the arquebus had held together, and the gun had to be reprimed before it could be shot again.

La Ronde, the world’s first revolving restaurant, opened in 1961 atop an office building fronting the Ala Moana Shopping Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. It was designed by John Graham, a Seattle, Washington, architect. La Ronde, which has since closed, was structured to completely rotate once every hour at the speed of ½ mile per hour. Food was prepared in the kitchen one floor down and brought up to an immobile central service area by a dumbwaiter. In 1962, Graham was commissioned to design the Space Needle for the Seattle World’s Fair, and he included a revolving restaurant in it, too. The Eye of the Needle was the world’s second revolving restaurant. In 1964, Graham obtained the first U.S. patent for a revolving restaurant.

Around 400 B.C.E., Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum built a mechanical wooden bird that was propulsion-powered by steam or some type of compressed air system. This first robot was called the Pigeon and was the first artificial, self-contained flying device. One of its experimental flights traveled more than 650 feet, but after it fell to the ground, it could not take off again without adjustments. In 1917, Czech playwright Karel Capek coined the term
robot
in his play
Opilek
as an expression for automation
.

In 1232 C.E., the rocket made its debut. It was a fire arrow created by the Chinese and used by the Chin Tartars for fighting off a Mongol assault during the Sung dynasty. The rockets were bamboo tubes, capped at one end, left open at the other, and attached to a long stick. When filled with gunpowder and ignited, the gunpowder’s rapid burning produced hot gas in the tube that escaped out the open end and produced thrust. The stick the rocket was attached to acted as a simple guidance system, and the simple, X-shape cross the rocket reclined in also helped aim it.

A mixture of cattle wrangling and bull fighting dates to the sixteenth-century conquistadors, but the first rodeo, where a cash prize was awarded ($40), took place on July 4, 1883, in Pecos, Texas, one block south of the Pecos Courthouse. Admission was free, and rodeo-goers could watch local cowboys ride broncos and rope steers. The rodeo came about that day because of bets from NA, Lazy Y, and W ranches that each had the fastest steer ropers. The blue ribbons given out were cut by pocketknife from the new dress of a 4-year-old girl in the crowd. The best roper was Morg Livingston of NA Ranch.

In the 1600s, the first roller coasters—or the ancestors of the mechanized versions that would come later—were created in Russia, in the area that would become St. Petersburg. People rode down steep ice slides on large sleds made from either wood or ice blocks. At first they used icy mountain paths, but soon the ice slides became ramped wooden constructions—some reaching 70 to 80 feet in height—with a sheet of ice several inches thick covering the surface. Steps or stairs were attached to the back of the slide. Riders would shoot down the ramp, zip up the other side, and gradually slide down to the middle. Some of these Russian ice slides stretched for hundreds of feet and accommodated many large sleds at once. Sand was placed at the end of the ride to slow down the coasters. The activity became so popular that Catherine the Great took part in it.

Various sources report that in the early 1700s in Holland an unknown Dutchman liked ice skating so much (he needed to, for transportation on Holland’s numerous frozen canals in the winter), he wanted to be able to do it in the summer, too. To skate on dry land, he nailed wooden spools to strips of wood and attached the strips of wood to his shoes with overlapping straps. The anonymous Dutchman and others who soon followed him on their own dry-land skates were nicknamed “skeelers.”

Gustaf Erik Pasch was a Swedish inventor and chemistry professor in Stockholm who invented the first safety match and was granted a patent in 1844. Commercial manufacturing was soon started but stopped soon after problems arose with the quality of the striking surface and the prohibitively expensive cost to produce the red phosphorus. More than a decade later, in 1855, Johan Edvard Lundstrom, also of Sweden, improved on Pasch’s design by creating a match that could only be safely lit off a special striking surface. Lundstrom’s efforts produced the world’s first commercially successful safety match.

On April 10, 1849, Walter Hunt of New York City received a patent for the first safety pin. He called his invention, which only took him 3 hours of wire twisting to create, a dress pin. Story has it that he wanted to pay off a $15 debt to a friend, so he decided to invent something new. Hunt’s first safety pin came from a piece of brass wire about 8 inches long. On one end he placed a clasp that held the point of the wire in place when it was squeezed together. Hunt sold the rights to the first safety pin for $400, paid back the $15 borrowed from a friend, and had $385 to spare.