First Accident

In 1869, Irish Scientist Mary Ward was riding in a steam-powered automobile built by her cousins. As they rounded a bend in the road, Ward was thrown from her seat and fell in the vehicle’s path. One of the wheels rolled over her and broke her neck, killing her instantly. Ohio City, Ohio claims the first accident involving a gasoline-powered auto, a little closer to what most of us think of as a car today. In 1891, engineer James Lambert was driving one of his inventions, an early gasoline-powered buggy, when he ran into a little trouble. The buggy, also carrying passenger James Swoveland, hit a tree root sticking out of the ground. Lambert lost control and the vehicle swerved and crashed into a hitching post. Both men suffered minor injuries.

First Airplane

The Wright Brothers, Orville (August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948) and Wilbur (April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912), were two American brothers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who are generally credited with inventing, building and flying the world’s first successful airplane. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft on December 17, 1903, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1904–05 the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft. Although not the first to build and fly experimental aircraft, the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.

First Bicycle

Baron Karl von Drais, a civil servant to the Grand Duke of Baden in Germany, invented his Laufmaschine (German for “running machine”) of 1817 that was called Draisine (English) or Draisienne (French) by the press. Karl von Drais patented this design in 1818, which was the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, commonly called a velocipede, and nicknamed hobby-horse or dandy horse. On his first reported from Mannheim on June 12, 1817, he covered 13km in less than an hour. Constructed almost entirely of wood, the Draisine weighted 22kg, had brass bushings within the wheel bearings, iron shod wheels, a rear-wheel brake and 152 mm of trail of the front-wheel for a self-centering caster effect. It was a Draisine which inspired a French metalworker around 1863 to add rotary cranks and pedals to the front wheel hub, to create the first pedal-operated ‘bicycle’.

First Camera

The concept of camera invention was done by various people but the first handheld camera was invented by Johann Zahn in France in 1685, 150 years before technology caught up to the point where this was possible.

First Computer

The first mechanical computer was created by Charles Babbage in 1822. He took nine years to build a part of the machine. This machine, which is in the London Science Museum, can make complex mathematical calculations. It is a basic mechanical computer.

First Machine Gun

It would not be until the mid-19th century that successful machine-gun designs came into existence. The key characteristic of modern machine guns, their relatively high rate of fire and more importantly mechanical loading, came with the Model 1862 Gatling gun, which was adopted by the United States Navy.

First Miss World

Miss World 1951, the first Miss World pageant, was held on 29^th July, 1951 at the Lyceum Ballroom in London, UK. A total of 26 contestants competed for the inaugural Miss World title. The winner was Kiki Håkansson from Sweden. She wore a “bikini” when being crowned, the only winner to ever do so.

First Movie Theater

The first theater in the world exclusively devoted to show motion pictures, was the Nickelodeon, which was opened on June 19, 1905 in Pittsburgh, Penn. The theater was the creation of Harry Davis and John P. Harris who moved 96 seats into an empty store at 433-435 Smithfield St., transforming it into the world’s first movie theater. The name was based on the cost of admission to the theater (a nickel) and the Greek word for theater (odeon). Among the first film shown were Poor But Honest and The Baffled Burglar.

First Refrigerator

When the first refrigerator was introduced in 1834, people didn’t buy them. The invention threatened the profitable ice industry and they reacted by engaging in a strategy that questioned the safety of refrigerators. Allegations were made that refrigeration poisoned food because it used ammonia gas.

The first inventor of the refrigerator was Oliver Evans in 1805, however, William Cullen invented the process in 1748 and Jacob Perkins invented more practical improvements in 1834.

First Television

John Logie Baird FRSE was a Scottish engineer, who innovate the ideas and inventor of the world’s first mechanical television. He demonstrated the first working television system on 26 January 1926, and inventor of both the first publicly demonstrated color television system, and the first purely electronic color television picture tube.

This is RCA 630-TS, the first mass produced TV set look when it was ready to sell in 1946-47.

First Website

On 6^th August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee published the world’s first website, World Wide Web, from a lab in the Swiss Alps. The site, originally found at the clunky URL “http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html,” was updated frequently after launching; therefore, images of its earliest versions were never saved. Nevertheless, a later copy from 1992 is still preserved and welcoming visitors.

First Nobel Prize Winners

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German/Dutch mechanical engineer and physicist, who, on 8 November 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The award was officially “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him”.

Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff, Jr. was a Dutch physical chemist. A highly influential theoretical chemist of his time, Hoff was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Emil Adolf von Behring as Emil Adolf Behring was a German physiologist who received the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first one awarded, for his discovery of a diphtheria antitoxin.

René François Armand (Sully) Prudhomme was a French poet and essayist. He was the first ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901. The Nobel was given “in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”.

The first ever novel peace award was jointly given to Henry Dunant, the founder of Red Cross and to French pacifist Frédéric Passy, founder of the Peace League and active with Dunant in the Alliance for Order and Civilization.

First Battery

In 1800, Alessandro Volta invented the first true battery, which came to be known as the voltaic pile. The voltaic pile consisted of pairs of copper and zinc discs piled on top of each other, separated by a layer of cloth or cardboard soaked in brine.

First Radio

James Clerk Maxwell showed in theoretical and mathematical form in 1864 that electromagnetic waves could propagate through free space. It is likely that the first intentional transmission of a signal by means of electromagnetic waves was performed in an experiment by David Edward Hughes around 1880, although this was considered to be induction at the time. In 1888 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was able to conclusively prove transmitted airborne electromagnetic waves in an experiment confirming Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. Over several years starting in 1894 the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi built the first complete, commercially successful wireless telegraphy system based on airborne Hertzian waves.

First Bodybuilder

Eugen Sandoh, born in April 2, 1867, was a pioneering German bodybuilder. His resemblance to the physiques found on classical Greek and Roman sculpture was no accident, as he measured the statues in museums and helped to develop “The Grecian Ideal” as a formula for the “perfect physique.” Sandow built his physique to the exact proportions of his Grecian Ideal, and is considered the father of modern bodybuilding, as one of the first athletes to intentionally develop his musculature to predetermined dimensions. In his books Strength and How to Obtain It and Sandow’s System of Physical Training, Sandow laid out specific prescriptions of weights and repetitions in order to achieve his ideal proportion.