Firsts (22 page)

The ancient Romans were the first to impose a sales tax. Around 6 C.E., Augustus Caesar introduced a sales tax to maintain the
aerarium militaire,
a military treasury he instituted. Calling the taxing program the
centesima rerum venalium,
Caesar’s policy was a 1 percent general sales tax collected on all goods purchased at auction.

Rabbi Hillel, the Elder, who lived in Jerusalem during the first century B.C.E., created the first recorded sandwich. Hillel sandwiched a mixture of chopped nuts, apples, spices, and wine between two matzohs (brittle, flat pieces of unleavened bread) to eat with bitter herbs. The first written record of the word
sandwich
appeared in the journal of English author Edward Gibbons on November 24, 1762. Gibbons had recorded seeing British politician John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, seated in The Cocoa Tree, a fashionable gentlemen’s gaming club in London. The cooks of the club invented the sandwich to serve Montagu, who habitually spent a full 24 hours at cards not wanting to leave the gaming table to eat. These first sandwiches were beef between slices of toast. The name caught on when others began to order “the same as Sandwich.”

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched
Sputnik I.
The world’s first man-made satellite was 22.8 inches in diameter—about the size of a beach ball—and weighed 183.9 pounds.
Sputnik I
took about 98 minutes to orbit the earth in an elliptical path and ushered in the start of the space age and the U.S.-USSR space race. Its purpose was to map the earth’s surface, but the
Sputnik
launch also led directly to the creation of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, on October 1, 1958.

In 1990, the first search engine created was called Archie, a name shortened from its originally intended name, Archives. Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, conceived and launched the search engine. Archie logged on to FTP (file transfer protocol) servers on an ever-growing list and made an index of what files were on the servers. It only did this process and updated itself monthly because processor time and bandwidth were still a fairly valuable commodity in 1990. Archie has since become relatively obsolete compared with subsequent search engines, but Archie servers still do exist.

On July 5, 1865, William P. Wood became the first U.S. Secret Service agent selected to head the Treasury Department’s newly established Secret Service agency. Shortly before this, and while still superintendent at the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C., Wood was temporarily assigned to the Solicitor of the Treasury and given the responsibility of detecting and capturing counterfeiters. In the chaotic hours following Lincoln’s shooting on April 14, 1865, Wood was the first to identify the assassin as John Wilkes Booth. However, it wasn’t until 1901 that the Secret Service received its official mandate to provide presidential protection. That was after President William McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901.

In Mexico City, Mexico, around 1535, the first seminary was housed in the small chapel of Santiago de Tlatelolco and its surrounding buildings. The seminary was founded by Spanish Franciscan Juan de Zumarraga, Mexico’s first Roman Catholic bishop. Its tutors were the Franciscans who taught the gifted sons of the Aztec nobility. Bernardino de Sahagún, the great chronicler of the history of New Spain, was one of its most notable teachers.

After committing his first murder in 1426, Frenchman Gille de Laval, the seigneur de Rais, abducted, raped, and murdered some 140 children, mostly young boys. He was the world’s first serial killer of record, in acts not associated with war or conquest. De Laval was a widely respected knight and noted soldier who had served under Joan of Arc at Orleans. After his military retirement, rumors spread of sadistic and murderous doings in his castle. Public uneasiness over his crimes all over France grew until he was handed over for trial on charges of heresy and sorcery to an ecclesiastical court. De Laval fully confessed to his hideous crimes and was publicly hanged on the gibbet at Nantes, France, on October 26, 1440.

In 1830, Barthelemy Thimonnier of Amplepuis, France, invented the first practical and functional sewing machine. There had been earlier patents and attempts by others, but they had all malfunctioned. In 1831, Thimonnier, a tailor, obtained the contract to produce uniforms for the French army. Afterward, he was almost killed when a mob of other French tailors burned down his garment factory. They feared unemployment because Thimonnier’s new invention used only one thread and a hooked needle that made the same chain stitch used with hand embroidering. Thimonnier’s sewing machine was built almost entirely of wood and used a barbed needle.

In 1916, the first planned automobile-centered shopping mall, Market Square of Lake Forest, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, opened to the public. Architect Arthur Aldis had persuaded the area’s wealthy residents and investors to form the Lake Forest Improvement Trust to build Market Square. It was an integrated shopping complex of 28 stores, 12 office units, 30 apartments, a gymnasium, a clubhouse, and pleasant landscaping. Many Lake Forest residents owned cars, so the automobile was the central factor in the overall planning—the center had convenient parking, for example. The National Register of Historic Places has listed Market Square as the first planned shopping district or mall in the United States. It’s still open today.

On February 14, 1908, Robert Winterhalder inaugurated the first lift specifically made for skiers. Winterhalder, who owned a small hotel in Schollach, north of Titisee-Neustadt in the Black Forest of Germany, spent years testing his lift before allowing the public to use it. He had created a mechanical system to let people climb the slopes by sitting on a sled or by sliding up while standing on skis. Users held onto a continuously moving cable, which was powered by a hydroelectric rig (a water mill that turned an electric generator). The lift was about 920 feet long and passed by 5 specially constructed wooden towers on its relatively gentle ascent to the top of the mountain. The cost of a ticket was 1 mark for 10 rides.

The first recorded skyjacking of an airplane took place in Arequipa, Peru, on February 21, 1931. Pilot Byron Rickards had taken off from Lima, Peru, in his Panagra Ford tri-motor plane and flown to the southern city of Arequipa. As he landed, a group of rebel soldiers surrounded and detained him. Rickards was ordered to fly his plane to destinations the hijackers gave him. He adamantly refused, and the hijackers took him and his plane as their prisoners. Rickards kept on refusing to lift off until March 2, when he was told that their revolution had been successfully concluded and that he was free to return to Lima as long as he took one of the hijackers with him. Rickards did just that and escaped bodily harm.

Although there’s no official definition or height above which a building may be clearly classified as a skyscraper, most agree that the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, Illinois, was the world’s first modern skyscraper. Built in 1885 mostly as an office building, it was very tall for its time. Architect-engineer William Le Baron Jenney designed and built the skyscraper, which was originally 10 stories tall and 138 feet high. Another two stories were added in 1890. It was also the world’s first building to be entirely supported by a steel frame. It was demolished in 1931 to make way for another building.

Mankind has been cutting or pulling apart bread by hand for thousands of years, but mechanically presliced packaged bread has only been available since 1928. It was that year that Otto Frederick Rohwedder introduced it for sale to the public on July 7 in Chillicothe, Missouri. He had invented the first machine to slice bread, which not only sliced it evenly but also wrapped it. Customers marveled at Rohwedder’s Sliced Kleen Maid Bread’s handiness for making sandwiches and toast. In 1930, Wonder Bread began selling presliced bread, and soon thereafter, many other bakeries followed suit. Not long after, toaster sales sky-rocketed, thanks to the now-standardized size of sliced bread. Without Rohwedder, no one could exclaim: “It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread!”

In 1891, Brooklyn, New York, manufacturing company Sittman and Pitt produced the first mechanical slot machine. It had a coin slot, and instead of reels, it had 5 drums that held 50 cards each. After a player inserted a nickel into the slot and pulled the lever, the cards spun in the drums. When the spinning stopped, five cards randomly lined up to form a poker hand, which was either an immediate winner or loser. There was no direct payout mechanism, but prizes were wholly dependent on what was offered at the local establishment. A pair of queens might win a free beer, three of a kind might be rewarded with an expensive cigar, two pair might bring the winner two free liquor drinks, etc. Many times the house bettered its odds by removing a couple cards from the decks of one or more drums.

In the late 1930s, Swiss physicist Walter Jaeger inadvertently invented the first smoke detector while trying to invent a sensor for poison gas. Jaeger expected that as gas entered the device’s sensor, it would bind to ionized air molecules and alter an electric current. The device failed, as small concentrations of gas did not affect the sensor’s conductivity. Story has it that a frustrated Jaeger lit up a cigarette and was soon surprised to notice that a meter on the instrument had registered a drop in current. The smoke particles had done what the poison gas could not. His experiment paved the way for the future of smoke detectors.

Plimsolls were the first rubber-soled shoes manufactured in the late 1800s, but they were not called sneakers. That name goes to Keds, the first rubber-soled shoes to debut and be mass marketed as canvas-top sneakers in 1917. The United States Rubber Company, which had been consolidated from nine smaller companies, was the first to offer the sneakers. Henry Nelson McKinney, an advertising agent for N. W. Ayer and Son, coined the word
sneakers
because the rubber sole made the shoe stealthy or quiet in a time when most other shoes made noise when the wearer walked.

The first snowmobile was a workhorse power sled and snowplow patented by Joseph, William H., and Moses C. Runnoe of Crested Butte, Colorado, on March 24, 1896. The object of the Runnoe gentlemen’s invention was “to produce a sled with a motor which may be driven over the snow or ice with sufficient power to haul a load after it or upon it, which has easy means of steering, and is adapted to support a steam-engine or other motor which is used for driving the sled.” This first snowmobile had an endless track of chain and eight steel crossbars, and from its patent’s drawings, it appeared to be an engineless framework for a later engine to be added. Although the patent examiners approved the mockup and issued patent #557,085, historians doubt that an actual working model, complete with engine, was produced at the time of the patent. It wasn’t until years later that other inventors furthered the concept of the Runnoes’ very first snowmobile.

Painted Dreams
was the first soap opera, so named because of the sponsorship of soap companies and manufacturers.
Painted Dreams
broadcast on the radio and debuted October 20, 1930, on WGN Radio in Chicago, Illinois. The 15-minute daily show was based on the relationship between Irish American widow Mother Moynihan and her unmarried daughter. The popular show broadcast during the day, mainly to a listening audience of housewives, and ran into the early 1940s. Irna Phillips, who worked for the radio station as an actress and a voice-over artist, created the show and acted in it. She went on to successfully create other radio soap operas and famous TV ones as well.

These Are My Children,
which debuted on NBC on January 31, 1949, was the first TV soap opera to air on a major network.

On August 19, 1934, the first soapbox derby race was held in Dayton, Ohio. As the first racing event for children, it utilized hand-crafted gravity-powered cars that started on a ramp on top of a hill. Myron Scott, a photographer for the
Dayton Daily News,
came up with the idea after snapping pictures of boys racing wooden crates with baby buggy wheels. The winner of the first soapbox derby was 11-year-old Bob Turner of Muncie, Indiana, who won $500 for first place. In 1935, the event was moved to Akron, Ohio, because of its more-hilly terrain—and the fact the
Akron Beacon-Journal
offered to build a permanent track for the youth racing classic.