The List Of World's First

This is a list of the first man/woman/animal/object etc., to do something or the first occurrence of an event.

Government

Leaders

• First Emperor of _The_Beginning_of_Imperial_China: Qin Shi Huang (ca. 221 BC)
• First Emperor of Ancient Rome: Augustus (ca. 27 BC)
• First Bishop of Rome to condemn heresy: Anicetus, by forbidding Montanism, also actively opposed the Gnostics and Marcionism
• First Bishop of Rome to be called "Pope": Siricius
• First Christian Monarch of Sweden: Olof Skötkonung (995)
• First President of the United States: George Washington. (1789)

*First US President to reside in the White House: John Adams (1797)

• First President of Chile: Manuel Blanco Encalada. (1826)
• First female President of Chile: Michelle Bachelet (2006)
• First Prime Minister of Sweden: Louis De Geer (1876)
• First Canadian-born Governor General of Canada: Vincent Massey (1952)

*First French-Canadian Governor General of Canada: Georges Vanier

*First female Governor General of Canada: Jeanne Sauvé

*First Prime Minister of Canada: Sir John A. Macdonald (1867)

*First French-Canadian Prime Minister of Canada (after Confederation): Wilfrid Laurier

*First female Prime Minister of Canada: Kim Campbell

• First elected female premier: Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka. (1960)
• First female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: Margaret Thatcher. (1979)
• First African-American elected governor of a U.S. state: Douglas Wilder of Virginia (1989)
• First President of Slovenia: Milan Kučan. (1990)
• First black President of South Africa: Nelson Mandela. (1994)
• First Prime Minister of Australia: Edmund Barton 1901
• World's first female President: Isabel Peron
• World's first female Prime Minister: Golda Meir of Israel
• First African elected female head of state: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as President of Liberia (16 January, 2006)
• First democratically elected female head of state: Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, President of Iceland
• First Prime Minister of India: Jawaharlal Nehru. (1947)

Laws and Constitution

• First law written in cuneiform - by Urukagina 2350 BC
• First written Constitution-- the oldest modern, national, codified constitution in the world
• First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

Crime and Punishment

Crime is defined by a ruling authority through laws and constitution, and penalized thereby. One anthropologist opines that punishment as such is a crime in itself, committed by the state.

• First victim of the punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering: Dafydd ap Gruffydd. October 3, 1283
• First person to be executed by the guillotine: Nicolas J. Pelletier, highwayman. April 25, 1792
• First instance of a murder captured live on television : Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. November 24, 1963. (See Ruby-shooting-oswald.jpg).

Travel and Exploration

• First people to reach the South Pole: Roald Amundsen and his party - Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting. December 14, 1911
• First (and only, as of 2005) people to reach the deepest point on the surface of the earth, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean: Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh on the Bathyscaphe Trieste. January 23, 1960
• First people to scale K2, the world's second-highest peak: Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni of the party led by Ardito Desio and Mario Puchoz. July 29, 1954
• First person to die in a crash of a powered airplane: Thomas Selfridge. September 17, 1908

Geographic North Pole

• First (disputed) expedition to the geographic North Pole: Robert Edwin Peary and his employee Matthew Henson and four Inuit men Ootah, Seegloo, Egingway, and Ooqueah. April 9, 1909
• First people to sight it: Roald Amundsen and his sponsor Lincoln Ellsworth from an aircraft piloted by Umberto Nobile, between 11 May and 13 May, 1926
• First people to reach it: Lt. Col. Joseph O. Fletcher and Lt. William P. Benedict landed their plane. May 3, 1952
• First naval vessel to reach it: the USS Skate (SSN-578). March 17, 1959
• First to reach the North Pole by surface travel: team led by Sir Wally Herbert. 1968-69
• First (confirmed) surface conquest: Ralph Plaisted. April 19, 1968
• First reigning monarch to reach it: Albert II, Prince of Monaco. Easter Sunday, 16 April, 2006

Mount Everest

• First recorded deaths on Mount Everest: 7 Sherpas die in avalanche in 1922
• First successful summit (via the South-East Ridge Route) Tenzing Norgay & Sir Edmund Hillary 29 May 1953
• First successful summit via the North Ridge by a Chinese team on 25 May 1960
• First American to reach summit James Whittaker in 1963
• First ascent of the West Ridge on 22 May 1963 Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein. Also the first traverse of the South East Ridge
• First person to summit Everest twice: Nawang Gombu Sherpa (20 May 1965)
• First woman to summit is Junko Tabei of Japan (16 May 1975) via the South-East Ridge
• First woman to summit from the North (Tibetan) side is a Tibetan woman named Phantog
• First summit from the South West face on 24 September 1975 are Dougal Haston and Doug Scott
• First Ascent without bottled oxygen is by Peter Habeler (Austria) and Reinhold Messner (Italy) (8 May 1978)
• First European woman and the third woman to summit Everest: Wanda Rutkiewicz
• First woman to die on Everest: Hannelore Schmatz, after becoming the 4th woman to summit Everest
• First Winter ascent is by Krzysztof Wielicki of Poland (17 February 1980)
• First Indian woman to reach the summit was Bachendri Pal (23 May 1984)
• First woman to climb without oxygen was Lydia Bradey of New Zealand (14 November 1988)
• First true ski descent by Davo Karničar of Slovenia (7 October 2000)
• First snowboard descent by Marco Siffredi
• First blind person to Summit Everest is Erik Weihenmayer (2000)

Beyond the Earth

• First artificial satellite launched into orbit: Sputnik 1. (1957)
• First animal to orbit Earth: Laika. (1957)
• First man in space: Yuri Gagarin. (1961)
• First woman in space: Valentina Tereshkova.(1963)
• First spacewalk: Aleksei Leonov. (1965)
• First human to walk on the Moon: Neil Armstrong (see Apollo 11). (1969)
• First woman to perform a space walk: Svetlana Savitskaya. (1984)
• First manned private spaceflight: SpaceShipOne piloted by Mike Melvill. June 21, 2004
• First spacecraft to orbit Saturn: Cassini-Huygens. July 1, 2004

Discoveries, Inventions, and Innovations

Natural History

• First homo sapiens : the Omo Remains include Omo I, the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens sapiens, dated to around 190,000 years ago. This is considerably older than the 160,000-year-old Herto remains, which had been thought to be the earliest humans, and suggests that, if humans did originate in Africa as is currently thought, they did not expand from there for much longer than previously thought.
• First observed transit of a planet across the sun, Mercury, by Pierre Gassendi in 1631.
• First international scientific collaboration: Observation of the transit of Venus 1761 and 1769
• First confirmation of an active volcanic eruption occurring on a seamount: by scientists at the University of Hawai‘i on Lo‘ihi in 1996

Life Sciences

• First vaccination:
*
• First whole-body scanner and x-ray machine: Dayton Miller (Case School of Applied Science), Cleveland, Ohio, 1896
*
• First blood transfusion: conducted by Dr. George Crile, Cleveland, Ohio (1905)
• First heart defibrillation: conducted by Dr. Claude Beck, Cleveland, Ohio (1947)
• First artificial pacemaker implant into a human: By a Swedish team using a pacemaker designed by Rune Elmqvist working under the direction of Åke Senning, 1958. The patient was Arne Larsson.
• First coronary artery bypass surgery: conducted by Dr. Rene Favaloro, Cleveland, Ohio (1967)
• First heart transplant:
• First implant of an artificial lung:
• First artificial pacemaker implant into an infant: Into Jason A. Haines when he was 16 hours old, July 26, 1974.
• First "test-tube baby": Louise Brown, born July 25, 1978 in England.
• First official recognition of AIDS: Centers for Disease Control issued a press release describing five cases in Los Angeles. June 5, 1981
• First person to be convicted by the process of DNA fingerprinting: Colin Pitchfork. 1988
• First person to be exonerated by the process of DNA fingerprinting: Richard Buckland. 1988
• First face transplant:
* *

Commodities

• First bottled food: in 1809 the French confectioner Nicolas François Appert developed a method of vacuum-sealing food inside glass jars
• First canned food: issued by the French Army
• First can-opener: invented 30 years after the first canned food
• First toothbrush
• First toothpoaste

Traffic Lights

Main article: Traffic Lights

• First traffic lights installed (gas lamp) : outside Houses of Parliament, London. December 10, 1868
• First traffic lights installed (electric) : by Salt Lake City policeman Lester Wire. 1912
• First traffic signal system installed : by the American Traffic Signal Company on the corner of 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. August 5, 1914
• First three-color traffic lights installed : in New York and Detroit. 1920
• First automatic traffic lights installed : in Wolverhampton, England. 1927

Information and Communications Technology

• Communication satellite firsts : Main article: List of communications satellite firsts
• First telecommunications system: Claude Chappe's semaphore lines. Between Paris and Lille in 1792
• First telephone message: Alexander Graham Bell in 1876: "Mr. Watson--come here--I want to see you."
• First case of an algorithm written for a computer: Ada Byron's notes on the analytical engine written in 1842
• First programmer: Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
• First programmable digital computer: Z3, 1941
• First programmable electronic computer: Colossus, 1943
• First e-mail: started around 1965
• First e-mail spam: sent using CTSS MAIL about 1971, at a time of campus unrest and anti-war rallies in the USA
• First reigning monarch to e-mail: sent by Queen Elizabeth II from a British army base in 1976
• First usage of a webcam: Trojan room coffee pot, 1991
• First electronic payment over the Internet: PaySafe, 1992
• First instant messaging service: ICQ released in November, 1996

Sports

• First footballer to be knighted: Sir Stanley Matthews, (1965)
• First human to run a mile under 4 minutes: Roger Bannister, (1954)
• First person to swim the English Channel: Matthew Webb, (1875)
• First woman to swim the English Channel: Gertrude Ederle, (1926)
• First free diver to descend 100 metres (330 feet) in water : Jacques Mayol, November 23, 1976
• First Olympian disqualified for drug use: Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall at the 1968 Summer Olympics
• First bungee jump: by four members of the Dangerous Sports Club led by David Kirke, from the 250ft Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. 1 April, 1979
• First woman to bicycle around the world: Annie Londonderry, (1895)

Literature

• First novel about invasion: The Battle of Dorking (1871), by George Tomkyns Chesney.
• First novel about spies: The Riddle of the Sands (1903), by Erskine Childers or The Spy, by James Fennimore Cooper (1821) (depends on your source and interpretation).
• First American novel: The Power of Sympathy, by William Hill Brown.

Other

• First person to wear a bikini: Micheline Bernardini. July 5 1946