Firsts (25 page)

The first evangelist to appear on television was Fulton J. Sheen, a Roman Catholic archbishop born in El Paso, Illinois. Sheen successfully made the switch to TV in 1951 after a couple decades of popular radio broadcasts. His
Life Is Worth Living
program aired on the DuMont Television Network and later on ABC. The program consisted of Sheen simply speaking in front of a live audience. He often spoke on the theology of current topics, including the evils of communism, while occasionally using a chalkboard to stress key points. Sheen won an Emmy Award for Most Outstanding Television Personality in 1952.

Although
TV Guide
distributed regional issues as early as 1948, the first national version was released April 3, 1953, at a price of 15¢. The cover of volume 1, number 1 featured an unsmiling baby boy dressed in yellow. A headshot of Lucille Ball also appeared in the top-right corner over the headline “Lucy’s $50,000,000 Baby.” The baby, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, was the first child of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, born on January 19, 1953.

On November 22, 1968, television’s first interracial kiss aired on a
Star Trek
episode titled “Plato’s Stepchildren” shown on NBC-TV. The kiss between characters Lieutenant Uhura and Captain Kirk, as played by African American Nichelle Nichols and Caucasian William Shatner, really wasn’t a romantic moment, as space aliens were using mind control to force the characters to kiss against their will. Still, some U.S. TV stations refused to air the episode.

With its debut on June 8, 1948,
The Texaco Star Theater,
also known as
The Milton Berle Show,
was TV’s first mega-hit show. Sponsored by the Texaco Oil Company, the show was enormously popular, and by November 1948, it had earned its highest rating of 86.7 percent of all TV households. This hour-long, comedy-variety NBC-TV series literally increased the sales of TV sets across the United States. Viewers
had
to see the show. Its comedic host, Milton Berle—or “Uncle Miltie,” as he was called—earned the title of “Mr. Television” because of the way his show caught the public’s imagination and influenced the growth of the medium. The show wound down in June 1956.

In 1950, Lazy Bones became the world’s first television remote control. Created by the Zenith Radio Corporation of Lincolnshire, Illinois, the device could turn a television on and off and change channels by activating a motorized mechanical tuner on the TV it was linked to. Lazy Bones wasn’t wireless, but rather attached to the television by a bulky cable. Consumers put up with the cable stretched out across the floor because they loved the convenience.

On October 8, 1936, on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Television Service in Great Britain
, Picture Page
became the first TV series to be broadcast. It was also the first series to become a long-running and regular popular hit. The program was in a magazine format with 2-hour-long segments broadcast live each week. It featured interviews with famous personalities and offered a wide range of topics, including public events taking place. The main star was Canadian actress Joan Miller, who played the role of a switchboard operator.
Picture Page
ran from 1936 to 1939, took a hiatus during World War II, restarted in 1946, and ran until 1952.

Mary Kay and Johnny
debuted as the first situation comedy, or sitcom, broadcast live on network TV on November 18, 1947, on the DuMont Television Network. The 15-minute-long weekly sitcom starred the real-life married couple of Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns, who also created and wrote all the scripts for the show. The program depicted the New York City apartment life of the title characters, a young married couple. During its almost 300 episodes, the show expanded to 30 minutes. CBS and later NBC also broadcast the show. The final episode aired March 11, 1950.

In 1942,
The Franklin Lacey Show
was TV’s first talk show (even though some historians argue the first credit belongs to
The Tonight Show,
which premiered in 1952). Franklin Lacey was a lanky young writer who had his own talk show on California station W6XYZ. Although there were only 40 TV sets being watched at that time in the Los Angeles area, Lacey’s talent glimmered as he interviewed local guests and talked about current events with some zaniness thrown in. Not much documentation remains about the show, but it was probably 30 minutes long and broadcast live daily for at least a couple years. Lacey went on to become an accomplished playwright.

The first umbrella goes back thousands of years to no exact dates. Early umbrellas were wide-leafed plants held over the head. Ancient drawings depict the Egyptians using a device similar to an umbrella. The first umbrellas were not used to deflect rain, but were often carried by slaves to shade their masters from the sun. Around 2,000 years ago, the ancient Chinese waterproofed their parasols and created the first rain umbrella.

On June 19, 1846, Alexander Jay Cartwright officiated a baseball contest between the Knickerbockers and the New York Nine at Elysian Field in Hoboken, New Jersey. The game was governed by his own “Cartwright’s Rules,” which were the first set of formal rules for baseball. The rules also laid out the sport’s diamond-shape field and established the players’ nine positions. During that first umpired game, Cartwright fined one player 6¢ for cursing. As the only umpire for the contest, Cartwright stood behind the pitcher to call balls and strikes and to make base calls. The New York Nine won the game 23-1 in 4 innings.

On June 3, 1953, the U.S. Congress officially credited Cartwright as the inventor of the modern game of baseball, debunking the popular myth Abner Doubleday had invented the game.

In 1823, the first vasectomy was performed on a dog in the United Kingdom. It was 1830 when Sir Astley Cooper published the first study on the topic, “Observations on the Structure and Diseases of the Testis,” at that same time. After the vasectomy was performed, it was observed later that the dog was able to have sex, yet unable to get other dogs pregnant. Cooper and his research assistants found out that despite shutting off the exit of the sperm, the testicles still produced sperm. The dog was killed for study 6 years later (in 1829), but its sperm was still being produced.

On October 12, 1899, Dr. Harry C. Sharp, as medical officer of the Jefferson Reformatory in Indiana, performed the first notable human vasectomy. The voluntary procedure, performed on a 19-year-old inmate by the last name of Clawson, was successful.

With roots in British music halls and French comic operas, vaudeville’s first clean variety show (early shows were a bit lewd and not family-friendly) was established in New York City by Tony Pastor in 1875. The show took place at the Metropolitan Theatre at 585 Broadway. In 1881, Pastor leased the Germania Theatre and renamed it Tony Pastor’s New Fourteenth Street Theatre. This was where he achieved his greatest vaudeville success. Pastor is considered “the father of modern vaudeville” because he brought in unrelated acts featuring magicians, acrobats, comedians, trained animals, singers, and dancers. Pastor was a highly moral producer and actor who solicited family trade. He influenced other theater managers to follow suit.

In March 1956, the Ampex VRX-1000 was introduced at a price of $50,000. Although it was 9 feet long and weighed 900 pounds, it made tape recordings of TV signals practical for the first time. Developed by Ampex of Redwood, California, the device was a VTR, or video tape recorder. Unlike a VCR, or video cassette recorder, the VTR did not use a cassette, only the tape itself. In the fall of 1975, the first VCR for home use was the SONY Betamax SL-6200 (SL-6300 in Japan). The VCR was contained within the LV-1901 console of a 19-inch Sony Trinitron television set. This package deal retailed for $2,495. In the spring of 1976, the Sony Betamax SL-7200 (SL-7300 in Japan) became the first fully domestic stand-alone VCR, complete with a built-in tuner, that could receive TV signals directly. It sold for $1,400. The biggest drawback to Betamax was that it could only record for 1 hour.

The first Velcro was invented in 1948 by electrical engineer Georges de Mestral of Commugny, Switzerland. Velcro is the trademark name for a nylon fastener consisting of two strips of fabric that form a bond when pressed together. De Mestral had become curious about how prickly seed husks clung to his clothes and his dog’s fur during hunting expeditions. He duplicated that bur principle to create a hook-and-loop fastener for garments. He received a patent for his invention in 1955.

On October 18, 1958, William Higinbotham introduced his
Tennis for Two
video game at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. Two people played the electronic tennis game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer. Using an oscilloscope with an electron beam sweeping across its screen,
Tennis for Two
was the first to entirely show a game’s visuals on a screen. Higinbotham was a nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. He never applied for a patent on this first video game.

The first voting machine was a lever-type device known as the Myers Automatic Booth invented by American Jacob H. Myers and put into use on April 12, 1892, at Lockport, New York, in a local election. Inside a curtained privacy booth, the voter pulled down selected levers to indicate his candidate choices. When the voter finished voting, he opened the privacy curtain with a handle. That caused the voted levers to automatically return to their original horizontal position. Interlocks in the machine prevented the voter from voting for more choices than was permitted.

In 1839, Charles Goodyear of New York, New York, discovered the first vulcanized rubber. Goodyear had carelessly dropped some rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove, where it charred like leather. He discovered that if he removed the sulfur from rubber and then heated the rubber, the rubber would retain its elasticity. This process, called vulcanization, made rubber water- and winter-proof and, thus, a very marketable product. Goodyear did not patent his invention until June 15, 1844.

From 1846 to 1850, American George Wilkins Kendall wrote daily stories of his experiences as a volunteer during the Mexican War. He sent his firsthand accounts back by private courier to the
Picayune,
a newspaper in New Orleans, Louisiana, he had cofounded. Kendall had volunteered to be in a Texas Ranger company that was attached to General Zachary Taylor’s army on the Rio Grande. The Rangers ran long and dangerous reconnaissance missions, and as a participant, Kendall’s in-the-field reporting and firsthand accounts of the war brought himself and his paper immediate fame.

The first clothes-washing machine was invented in 1677 by Sir John Hoskins of England, a philosopher and lawyer who devoted the latter part of his life to experiments and tinkering. His washing machine used a wheel and cylinder to squeeze water through a coarse-weaved bag of soapy linens. It wrung out the dirty water, cleaning the clothes. The clothes were then removed from the bag and hung to dry.

According to a poem by early Greek writer Antipater, the first water mill dates to about 4000 B.C.E. The poem tells of the water mill providing freedom from the toil of young women who operated small hand mills to grind corn. The first waterwheels, the energy-generating point of water mills, were grindstones mounted atop vertical shafts. The horizontal wheel contained paddled slats that dipped into a swift stream and made the wheel turn. In the first century, the horizontal waterwheels were replaced by vertical ones, which greatly improved the transfer of the water current’s power to the milling mechanism. The water mills were used for crop irrigation, to grind grains, and to supply drinking water to villages.