List of firsts

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

Contents

1 Government

1.1 Leaders
1.2 Laws and Constitution
1.3 Crime and Punishment

2 Travel and Exploration

2.1 Geographic North Pole
2.2 Mount Everest
2.3 Beyond the Earth

3 Discoveries, Inventions, and Innovations

3.1 Natural History
3.2 Life Sciences
3.3 Commodities
3.4 Traffic Lights
3.5 Information and Communications Technology

4 Sports
5 Literature
6 Other
7 See also

Government

Leaders

First Emperor of [[History_of_China#Qin_Dynasty:_The_Beginning_of_Imperial_China|Ancient 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

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 [pic]).

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

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 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.[link] 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 blood transfusion:
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 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 "test-tube baby": Louise Brown, born July 25, 1978 in England.
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 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

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." [link]

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 instant messenger: ICQ released in November, 1996
First usage of a webcam: Trojan room coffee pot, 1991

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 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 Houses of Osma and Almeria, by Regina Maria Roche.

Other

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