December 19, 2009
Learn How To
Play The Piano – 40 YouTube lessons
when things
went wrong
I didn’t turn
to drugs or
teaching
I tried to
sleep
but when I
couldn’t sleep
I learned to
write
I learned to
write
what might be read
on nights like
this
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Thanksgiving
Timelapse (2009) by Jared Foster
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I had no idea so many people make a hobby of traveling beneath the sea in homemade junkers they call submarines. Here's a few of these DIY subs...
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Another Pi pie
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(Yes, I'm not here usually. I blog now at Grow-a-baby instead)December 19, 2009 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 16, 2009
First child born in Antarctica
The first Peanuts Comic, October 2, 1950
List of attendees at the first Bilderberg meeting, May 29 to May 31, 1954. List of all attendees at the Bilderberg group meetings. All attendees from the 2008 meeting
Emilio Marcos Palma, born on January 7, 1978 to Argentine parents at Esperanza, Hope Bay, the first child born in Antarctica. He is featured in the Guinness Book of Records as the only person in history known to be the first born on a continent. (From Darren Barefoot)
Un-related: The Periodic Table of the Elements, Standard Form
A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories, my favorite collection, Here
March 16, 2009 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 31, 2008
First item sold on eBay
eBay was founded as AuctionWeb on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, and Phil Fischer, as part of a larger personal site that included, among other things, Omidyar's own tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Ebola virus. In 1997, the company received approximately $5 million in funding from the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.
The very first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask if he understood that the laser pointer was broken. In his responding email, the buyer explained:
"I'm a collector of broken laser pointers"...
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Here are some Unusual items auctioned on eBay
eBay’s List of acquisitions includes 25% of Craigslist (Here is Craigslist headquarters in San Francisco)
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Also, Futility closet’s first post, 3 years ago tomorrow
And from there: "Vse zene" - The world’s Shortest will
A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
December 31, 2008 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack
September 25, 2008
Auguste D.
El Apóstol (The Apostle) is a 1917 Argentine animated cartoon, and also the world's first animated feature film. It was written and directed by Quirino Cristiani, and consisted of a total of 58,000 frames played over the course of 70 minutes. The film is believed to have been well-received by audiences at the time. Despite this, no known copies of the film have survived
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Auguste D., the first person diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease (1901)
Ronald Reagan & Charlton Heston , 1981
A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
September 25, 2008 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 29, 2008
Tennis For Two
Way back in 1958, William Higinbotham invented “Tennis For Two” to liven up visitor day at Brookhaven National Laboratory, his workplace. The game uses an oscilloscope with two control pads. It remained largely unknown until 1981 when a lawyer trying to break Magnavox's patent for video games came across writings talking about the game.
Blueprints of it were found to predate Magnavox's game, the case was settled out of court, and the game found fame as the second ever invented, since it was later predated by A.S. Douglas' 'OXO' game from 1952.
In retrospect, Higinbotham agreed he should have applied for a patent. But if he had, the patent would have belonged to the Federal government, and no riches would have come his way, anyway. The reason he did not apply, was that at the time, it didn't seem to be any more novel than the bouncing ball circuit in the instruction book
(Music on the video is 'To Find Our Freedom' by Peacekeepers, from the album 'Message From Planet Earth')
A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
May 29, 2008 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 02, 2008
First VCR
The The Ampex Signature V. The first domestic video recorder. In 1963 this unit was offered in the Neiman-Marcus catalog for $30,000 It was nine feet long and weighed 900 pounds. The video portion of the system included the Black & White reel-to-reel video recorder with TV tuner and automatic timer as well as a home television camera.
The cabinet also housed a complete audio system including an AM/FM tuner, stereo amplifier, record player, reel-to-reel audio recorder, and stereo loudspeakers. A colour TV was viewable from the front of the console, while all other components were accessed from the top. The $30,000 price tag included a personalized plaque and installation by an Ampex service engineer
The Philips N1500 VCR with analogue clock from 1972. Everyone agrees that this was the first domestic cassette recorder
Much more at The Museum of early consumer electronics Rewind museum
1938 - First album cover. (From Undependent)
A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
March 2, 2008 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 17, 2007
The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances for Many Years
1485 - Le Morte d'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory. The first book in English
1809 - The French confectioner Nicolas François Appert developed a method of vacuum-sealing food inside glass jars, thus creating the first can
1889: The first jukebox is installed at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. It becomes an overnight sensation and its popularity spreads around the world
Re-post: The first transistor was built 60 years ago on Dec. 16, 1947
Kicki Håkansson, the first woman to win the Miss World title, 1951
Rocket 88 by Ike Turner & Jackie Brenston (1951), first recorded at Sam Phillips' recording studio in Memphis, on 3 March or 5 March 1951. It is usually acknowledged as the first "rock and roll" song (YT)
The First Ever Coin-Operated Arcade Machine from 1971 (with Video)
2000 - Erik Weihenmayer, first blind person to Summit Everest and the only blind person to have climbed the "Seven Summits"
A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
December 17, 2007 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 06, 2007
Horn broken. Watch for finger
Sept. 13, 1899: Henry Bliss becomes the First Pedestrian Killed by Car in North America.
Bliss, a Manhattan real estate salesman, had just stepped off a streetcar at West 74th Street and Central Park West when he was struck by a passing taxicab. It knocked him unconscious, crushing his skull and chest. He died the following morning.
The driver of the cab, an electric-powered vehicle, was arrested and charged with manslaughter. The charges were dropped after it was determined that Bliss' death was unintentional.
On the centennial of his death, a plaque was placed at the site by Citystreets, a safety-awareness organization
A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
November 6, 2007 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 09, 2007
The Morris worm
The first time that certain people & things were mentioned in the New York Times. For example, Microsoft on August 13, 1981, The Simpsons on December 23, 1988
First ever singer to use a wireless headset radio microphone on stage, Kate Bush in her 1979 Tour of Life
The Morris worm, first computer worm distributed via the Internet, November 2, 1988
WebCrawler, the first full text search engine (April 20, 1994)
Born between Salzburg and Braunau am Inn, one of the sites on wikipedia’s Mozart article. This was the first of wikipedia’s featured articles, February 22, 2004. Today’s excellent article, for example, is about “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”, a 1944 triptych by Francis Bacon
Re-post / unrelated: Sad Song by Fredo Viola (created entirely using 15 second JPEG movies from my Nikon Coolpix 775 camera and composted in After Effects)
A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
August 9, 2007 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 29, 2007
The great Eugene Sandow
Bertha Benz was the first person to drive an automobile over a long distance (1888)
The great Eugene Sandow (YT) & Loïe Fuller's Danse Serpentine - What the first moviegoers saw
Mary Phelps Jacob, Inventor of the Modern Brassiere (1914). From Neatorama’s stories about the origins of everyday objects
Many of us think of the movie “Tron” as the the first film to use computer animation or effects in any form. But the technology goes back a lot further than 1982, when Tron was released. The World's First Computer Animation And Effects In Film
Also - UNRELATED - a missing puzzle piece gallery from Planet Dan
/// A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories (my favorite collection) Here
June 29, 2007 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 15, 2007
First photo on the www
Oldest. Thing. Ever. At least 4,600,000,000 years
World’s First Coin - c. 600-575 BC
The 'Tulip stairs’ at The Queen's House in Greenwich, the first centrally unsupported spiral stair in Britain - 1616
Robert Cocking was the developer of an early unsuccessful parachute design and the first person to be killed in a parachuting accident - 1837
Shoshone National Forest, in Yellowstone, the first federally protected forest in the US - 1891
First zipper - 1893. (From Apparel Search)
The first triangular postal map stamp was issued in 1894 by Liberia
Outrageous Firsts in Television History. (Also there, Top Ten Closet Stoners in TV History)
Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim's now famous "info.cern.ch" - Les Horribles Cernettes, the first rock band to have a website, and the subject of the first photographic image on the Web -1992
/// Add it to your del.icio.us /// A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories (my favorite collection) Here
January 15, 2007 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack
November 17, 2006
First Frisbee
In Bridgeport, CT., the Frisbie Baking Company sold pies in metal dishes. Boredom led to recreation and the Frisbee was born - 1948. (From Slap’s blog)
First Garfield strip: June 19, 1978
The First Russian Laptop, made under the brand “Elektronika”. The production started in 1991 and lasted not very long due to the high price of the device - none of the common people could afford themselves such devices. The price for the computer was around $6000, that equals 25,000 roubles according to that time’s exchange rate, when the average salary across the country was 500 roubles
In the game of life, no one remembers the second bluegrass icon killed by a tractor. Blender salutes the songs, stars—and cannibals—who got there first. Famous Musical Firsts. (From J-Walk)
/// Add it to your del.icio.us /// A Huge Depository of Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
November 17, 2006 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 15, 2006
First town in the world to have electric street lights
Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent on his telephone in 1876. He demonstrated it to visitors to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition that same year. In early 1878, he installed the first telephone exchange, in New Haven, Connecticut. The First Telephone Book - actually just a single 14 cm. x 21 cm. sheet - was issued in New Haven in 1878. Below is a 1978 facsimile of that sheet
On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the of the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse
First lighthouse in the US - Boston, MA (1716)
The first concrete highway in N.J. built with concrete from the Edison Cement Plant in New Village. Photos by Dick Harpster
First ever 1,000,000 answer thread (Still 981,675 comments short)
Famous Firsts - history making "first ever" accomplishments. Also from Corsinet, the last of things
Bush’s first veto, July 20, 2006 - get rid of them no-good, pesky stem cells
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August 15, 2006 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 17, 2006
Naked World Records
First man to stand naked at both North and South poles and other naked records (Including First picture of naked person transmitted over the internet, on Rusty n Edie's BBS, May 11, 1987. (When you search for Naked on Google, this website comes up first… SFW)
First uses of computer-generated imagery in film and television, since 1973
World's Oldest Condom, 1640
Earliest portrait discovered 27,000 years old
Earliest bird fossils from China are 11 million years old, announced this week on the journal Nature. (Here’s an electronic version of the first issue from 1869)
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June 17, 2006 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 04, 2006
First spam email
Dan Rice (1823-1901) - Lincoln's Court Jester, Uncle Sam's model and America's first clown. (From America's First Greats)
What was the world's first spam email? (1978)
The first Astronomy Picture of the Day, June 16, 1995. APOD of yesterday, March 3, 2006. APOD of March 1, 2006: Multiverses: Do Other Universes Exist? By Clifford Pickover. All pictures in the APOD Archive
Six years ago today I posted the following to a group on Usenet: “... Mizzy. I have great respect for the way you live your life. We share so much of what we find important in this world. You are kind, thoughtful, intelligent, loving, and a beautiful soul. My greatest dream would be to spend the rest of my life with you. If I spent hours writing this I could not list all that is great about you. I'll close with words directly from my heart…Will you marry me? “… I have no idea if it was the first first marriage proposal on Usenet, but it was my only one. She said yes. We were married soon after
Many More Unusual ‘First Ever’ Stories Here
March 4, 2006 in First Ever | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
