Firsts (23 page)

The first recurring-monthly Social Security check, numbered 00-000- 001, was issued to 65-year-old Ida May Fuller on January 31, 1940, in the amount of $22.54. Fuller filed her retirement claim on November 4, 1939, having worked under Social Security for almost 3 years. For processing, the claims were grouped in batches of 1,000, and a certification list for each batch was sent to the U.S. Treasury. Fuller’s claim was the first one on the first certification list.

On May 3, 1978, the first spam e-mail was sent over ARPAnet, the Defense Department’s network that was the precursor to today’s Internet. A marketing executive for Digital Equipment Corporation by the name of Gary Thuerk was the world’s first e-mail spammer. He wanted to publicize two open house events, one in Los Angeles on May 9, and one in San Mateo on May 11, where his company’s latest computers would be unveiled. Several hundred invitations were successfully sent to the ARPAnet members on the West Coast. The reaction was mainly negative, but it did generate more attendees that turned into sales at the open houses.

The first manufactured spandex fibers were produced as an experiment by Farbenfabriken Bayer, who earned a German patent for his synthesis in 1952. The final development of the fibers was worked out elsewhere independently. In 1959, after a decade of research, DuPont scientist Joseph C. Shivers invented a more advanced and sophisticated version than Bayer’s early experiment. Although it was originally designated Fiber K, DuPont’s marketing department came up with the trade name Lycra. That name distinguished DuPont’s brand as the first manufactured spandex fiber. DuPont began full-scale manufacture of Lycra in 1962.

On January 27, 1896, in Great Britain, the first automobile speeding ticket was issued to Walter Arnold, the pioneer of the petrol-engine car. He was driving through Paddock Wood in Kent at 8 miles per hour (mph)—four times the legal limit of 2 mph, which had been imposed for built-up areas. A policeman who cut short his lunch break, donned his helmet, and gave chase on his bicycle for some distance apprehended Arnold. Arnold was caught and fined 1 shilling. At the time there were only about 20 cars total in Great Britain.

In 1953, Jerome K. Sherman founded the world’s first sperm bank in Iowa City, Iowa. A doctoral candidate student at the University of Iowa in the early 1950s, Sherman’s extensive research led him to a method of successfully freezing and thawing sperm. With his work in cryobiology (the study of organisms and cells at sub-zero temperatures), Sherman took earlier scientific and related efforts to the next level. His methods made sperm banks possible, and it was from that first sperm bank that the first human birth resulting from the use of cryopreserved semen was realized.

The first sport to be filmed was boxing, on June 14, 1894. Thomas Edison supervised the filming in his Black Maria studio on the grounds of his laboratory complex in West Orange, New Jersey. The boxing match was a sparring six-round contest between Mike “Beau Brummel” Leonard and Jack Cushing. The film featured hard fighting, clever hits, punches, leads, dodges, body blows, and slugging. Each round of the boxing contest was about 150 feet of film and lasted around 37 seconds. William Heise was the cameraman.

In 1954, the first
Sports Illustrated
Sportsman of the Year award went to track and field athlete Roger Bannister of Great Britain, the world’s first person to run a sub 4-minute mile. Bannister received the award’s trophy, a ceramic urn depicting Greek athletes, in January 1955. Since its inception in 1954,
Sports Illustrated
magazine has annually presented the award to “the athlete or team whose performance that year most embodies the spirit of sportsmanship and achievement.” In 1972, tennis player Billie Jean King became the first female winner.

The first
Sports Illustrated
magazine swimsuit issue edition was dated January 20, 1964, and sold for 25¢. The cover featured model Babette March with a finger curled under her nose. She was wearing a white two-piece bathing suit and standing in nearly knee-deep water in the island surf of Cozumel, Mexico. The special issue was invented by
Sports Illustrated
editor Andre Laguerre along with fashion reporter Jule Campbell. This first swimsuit edition contained a five-page swimsuit model layout.

The first sportswriter of considerable noteworthiness was Grantland Rice. After he graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1901, Rice worked various newspaper jobs. He saw sports as life itself and rose up as the subject’s best-known and most respected writer. Recognized as a national sports authority, Rice’s syndicated “Sportslight” column appeared in more than 100 newspapers. In 1924, Rice gave the backfield of Notre Dame’s football team its legendary name, the “Four Horseman.” He also coined the phrase “It was not important whether you won or lost, but how you played the game.”

On October 21, 1947, the Northrop YB-49 became the first stealth aircraft. A prototype (at least nine others had been built), the “flying wing” could fly continually above 40,000 feet for as long as 6 hours. That height was beyond radar’s normal and clearly verifiable airborne-targeting detection of the era. That made the Northrop YB-49 invisible, or stealth. The aircraft was designed and built by John Northrop, who modified the propeller-driven version of the post-WWII wing and equipped it with jet engines. The YB-49 had a range of 3,200 miles, a maximum speed of 495 miles per hour, and a wingspan of 172 feet. The plane’s design had great promise, but several tragic accidents ensued, as the technology of the day was not capable of controlling the plane satisfactorily while in flight. The designers needed the computers that, unfortunately, wouldn’t be available until some 20 years later.

In 1698, Thomas Savery, an English military engineer and inventor, patented the first crude steam engine to solve the problem of pumping water out of coal mines. Savery described his machine as a “new invention for raising of water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the impellent force of fire.” Savery’s machine consisted of a steam boiler and a separate pumping vessel with an intake valve at the bottom. Steam under pressure forced the water upward and out of the mine shaft. Then a water sprinkler condensed the steam and created a vacuum, which sucked out more water. Savery’s first steam engine could not work under extremely high pressure, thus lacking the power of later pumps.

The first steamship to move under its own power was the
Pyroscaphe,
tested on the Saone River near Lyon, France, in 1783. Built by Claude-Francois-Dorothee, Marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans, the
Pyroscaphe
was 138 feet long and fitted with a double ratchet mechanism that continuously rotated the paddle wheels. Its large and heavy steam engine moved the vessel upstream for about 15 minutes until the engine’s vibrations broke the ship apart. After his patent application became indefinitely delayed, Jouffroy d’Abbans stopped his experiments. In 1807, American inventor Robert Fulton’s
Clermont
steamship, although not the first to be built, was the first to become commercially successful. Fulton gave much credit to his predecessor Jouffroy d’Abbans.

Completed in 1874 with steel the primary structural material, the Eads Bridge in St. Louis became the first use of steel in a major bridge project. Still in operation, the bridge is a combined road and railway bridge over the Mississippi River that connects St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois. Named for its designer and builder, James B. Eads, the bridge’s 500-foot ribbed steel arch spans were considered daring at the time. Due to its overall length of 6,442 feet, the Eads Bridge was also the first bridge to be built using cantilever (at only one end) support methods exclusively. During its construction, 15 workers died and 2 others were permanently disabled.

The first building entirely supported by a steel frame, and the first large-scale use of steel in a building, was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, Illinois. Built by architect-engineer William Le Baron Jenney in 1885, the building was originally 10 stories tall and 138 feet high. Another two stories were added in 1890. The building’s metal frame was completely encased in brick or clay-tile cladding for fire protection. Demolished in 1931 to make room for another building, it was also considered the world’s first skyscraper.

Aside from antiquity’s clay tokens used for accounting and financial purposes, the first company to issue stock was the Dutch East India Company (Dutch Vereinigte Oostindische Compaignie, or VOC) in 1602. A stock is a share of ownership in a company that can be bought, sold, or traded. The States-General of the Netherlands granted the trading company a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia. By issuing and selling stock certificates, the Dutch East India Company remained an important trading concern that paid an 18 percent annual dividend to its stockholders for almost 200 years.

Around 1450, the Beurs Stock Exchange was founded in Bruges, Belgium. The exchange was established by the Van de Buerse family of financiers, brokers who kept an inn where financial transactions were concluded. Bankers gathered in front of their inn house to engage in securities trading. In the early sixteenth century, this flourishing period came to an end as the economic and commercial center moved to Antwerp, Belgium. The French word
bourse
is for “stock market,” which derived from the Van de Buerse family name.

On November 15, 1867, the first stock ticker debuted in New York City, when Edward Calahan configured a telegraph machine to print stock quotes on streams of paper tape. The ticker device got its name from the sound its type wheel made. It ultimately revolutionized the stock market by making up-to-the-minute prices available to investors around the country. Calahan worked for the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company in New York. The company rented its tickers to brokerage houses and regional exchanges for a fee and then transmitted via telegraph the latest gold and stock prices to all its machines at the same time.

In a series of trials between 1620 and 1624, Dutch inventor Cornelius J. Drebbel (Van Drebbel) built and demonstrated the world’s first submarine. The craft’s hull was a wooden frame skinned with greased leather and was powered by oars that protruded through flexible leather seals. It had a submergence time of several hours, thanks to snorkel air tubes running into the vessel and held above the surface by floats, and successfully maneuvered at depths of 12 to 16 feet during repeated trials in England’s Thames River. Van Drebbel followed his first submarine with two other larger ones, but although his work was shown to King James I, it failed to arouse the British navy’s interest.

The Metropolitan, the world’s first subway, opened on January 10, 1863, in London, England. First proposed by City Solicitor Charles Pearson in 1843, builders completed the 3.75-mile underground railway between Farrington Street and Bishop’s Road, Paddington, in less than 3 years. The subway was powered by steam locomotives that spewed tremendous amounts of sulfurous smoke into its tunnel, but the “underground” was an immediate success, attracting 30,000 riders on its first day of operation and 9,500,000 passengers in its first year.

The first sulfonamide (sulfa drug) was trade named Prontosil. It began in 1932 as several experiments in the laboratories of the German company Bayer AG and was discovered and synthesized by a team under the general direction of Heinrich Hoerlein, Josef Klarer, and Gerhard Domagk. The team discovered that an azo dye, Prontosil, cured streptococcal infections in mice. The first official communication about the breakthrough discovery was not published until 1935. The dye-based Prontosil was the first medicine that could effectively treat a range of bacterial infections inside the body.

Since ancient times in both Egypt and India, inorganic clays and mineral powders were used to protect the skin from the sun. But in 1938, Gletscher Crème became the first effective sunscreen. It was developed by a young Austrian chemistry student named Franz Greiter. While climbing Piz Buin, a mountain on the Swiss-Austrian border, Greiter had suffered severe sunburn. Afterward and with inspiration, he formulated a product that would protect the skin against the adverse effects of the sun. Greiter developed his crème, which would later become known as Piz Buin, in a small laboratory in his parents’ home.

In 1942, Dr. Harry Coover discovered a substance called cyanoacrylate, the chemical name for what would later become super glue, while working for Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York. Coover was searching for materials to make clear plastic gun sights for WWII firearms and stumbled upon a substance that stuck to everything it came into contact with. Coover rejected his first super glue because it was
too
sticky. Later, in 1951, while supervising research at the Eastman Company in Kingsport, Tennessee, Coover finally realized that cyanoacrylate was, indeed, a useful product, but it wasn’t until 1958 that the Eastman compound #910 was marketed and later packaged as super glue.

In 1911, the first superconductor known to physicists was mercury, discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, director of the Cryogenic Laboratory at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Superconductivity is a phenomenon occurring in certain materials at very low temperatures, characterized by no electrical resistance. Onnes studied the resistance of solid mercury at cryogenic temperatures using liquid helium as a refrigerant. He found that mercury cooled to 4.2 degrees Kelvin (about -269 degrees Celsius) exhibited almost no electrical resistance. In subsequent decades, superconductivity was found in several other materials, but mercury was the first.