History’s most memorable firsts do not always arrive in predictable ways. Some begin with extraordinary courage, such as Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile after a hospital shift, while others emerge from accidents, rivalry, discrimination, or technological experimentation. This fourth collection explores 50 milestones spanning medicine, spaceflight, sports, entertainment, transportation, politics, and communication, from the first SMS and handheld cellphone call to the first crewed descent into the Mariana Trench. Together, these stories show how a single breakthrough, record, invention, or act of defiance can open doors, expose limitations, and permanently change what people believe is possible. If you missed the earlier installments, explore Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
1 George Williams Names Humanity’s Crimes
The first attested use of the term “crimes against humanity” came from American minister, politician, and historian George Washington Williams in 1883, when he used it while writing about slavery in the United States. Its better-known use came in 1890, after Williams met King Leopold II of Belgium and visited the Congo Free State, which Leopold controlled as his personal possession. Horrified by the widespread brutality inflicted on the Congolese people, Williams used the phrase in a letter to the U.S. secretary of state describing atrocities committed by Leopold’s administration. This 1890 usage is often cited as the phrase’s first appearance in its modern English sense.
2. The first contestant on the U.S. version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to answer the $1 million question incorrectly was Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Ken Basin on August 23, 2009. With $500,000 at stake, he was asked which drink President Lyndon B. Johnson could summon with an Oval Office button alongside coffee, tea, and Coke. Basin wondered whether he would regret walking away and learning he was right more than risking his winnings and being wrong, then followed his audience lifeline and chose Yoo-hoo instead of the correct answer, Fresca. The mistake cost him $475,000 and left him with $25,000.
3. The first woman to direct a film that earned more than $100 million at the U.S. box office was Penny Marshall. Her 1988 body-swap comedy Big, starring Tom Hanks, became the groundbreaking hit that carried her past the milestone. Marshall repeated the achievement with A League of Their Own in 1992, making it her second film to cross $100 million.
4. The first reported case of a sexually transmitted allergic reaction involved a 20-year-old woman with a documented Brazil nut allergy. She developed widespread hives and mild breathing difficulty after intercourse with her boyfriend, who had eaten Brazil nuts earlier. Skin-prick testing found no reaction to semen collected before he ate the nuts but significant reactivity to a sample collected afterward, supporting the researchers’ conclusion that the allergen had passed through his semen.
5. The first fully electric cargo ship was launched in China in 2017, and its designer claimed that the vessel posed “no threats to the environment.” Its 2,400-kWh lithium-ion battery could carry 2,200 tons of cargo for about 50 miles before requiring a two-hour recharge. Despite producing no carbon emissions while underway, the ship was intended primarily to haul coal to power stations along the Pearl River.
6 Mezzanine Becomes DNA Spray-Paint Album
The first album released with its audio encoded in synthetic DNA was Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. To mark its 20th anniversary in 2018, researchers compressed the album’s digital audio and converted it into 920,000 DNA fragments stored inside microscopic glass beads. The DNA was then mixed into matte-black spray paint and released in limited-edition aerosol cans, each containing approximately one million copies of the album.
7. The first call from a handheld cellular phone was made on April 3, 1973, by Motorola researcher and executive Martin Cooper. For the historic demonstration, Cooper called Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, his rival in the race to develop cellular telephone technology. The Motorola prototype weighed 2 kilograms, provided only 30 minutes of talk time, and required 10 hours to recharge.
8. The first message transmitted over the Moscow-Washington hotline was sent by Washington on August 30, 1963: “THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG’S BACK 1234567890.” The pangram and digits tested the equipment’s ability to print every letter and number, while the all-capital format was necessary because the system did not support lowercase. Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko later asked U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk what Americans meant by the strange sentence.
9. The first Black man to lead a Western capital was Cuban-born French politician Severiano de Heredia, who became president of the Paris Municipal Council in 1879. Paris had no elected mayor between 1871 and 1977, so the council presidency functioned as the city’s mayor-equivalent office. De Heredia later served in the Chamber of Deputies and briefly became France’s minister of public works in 1887.
10. The first Black astronaut selected by the United States was Air Force Major Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. in June 1967. At the announcement, a reporter asked, “Will you have to sit in the back seat of the capsule?” Lawrence and the other astronauts laughed at the question. He never reached space, dying at age 32 in an F-104 plane crash in December 1967, less than six months after his selection.
11 Cooper Union Shaft Awaited Elevator
The first purpose-built elevator shaft reportedly preceded the first modern safety passenger elevator by four years. In 1853, Peter Cooper included a cylindrical shaft in New York’s Cooper Union Foundation Building because he believed a safe passenger elevator would soon be invented. Elisha Otis installed his first safety passenger elevator in 1857 and later designed a special elevator for Cooper’s building.
12. The first and only athlete to throw a javelin beyond 100 meters was East German Uwe Hohn. On July 20, 1984, he threw 104.80 meters, shattering the previous world record of 99.72 meters. A redesigned javelin with its center of gravity moved forward by four centimeters was introduced in 1986, forcing officials to restart the records and leaving Hohn with an “eternal world record” for the old design. Although the change had been proposed before his throw, Hohn’s enormous distance accelerated its adoption because similar throws risked exceeding the available space in stadiums.
13. The first female and youngest person ever enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy was 6-year-old Nancy Bentley in 1920. After a venomous snake bit her near Port Arthur, Tasmania, her father rowed her to HMAS Sydney (I), but naval regulations prohibited civilians from receiving treatment aboard warships. Captain Henry Cayley solved the problem by formally enlisting Nancy as an honorary sailor with the official rating of “mascot” and a service term of “until fed up.” After receiving treatment, she was returned to her family and discharged following eight days of service.
14. The first gymnast to receive a perfect Olympic score was 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comaneci during her uneven-bars routine at the 1976 Montreal Games. Because officials had assured scoreboard manufacturer Omega that a perfect 10.00 was impossible, its three-digit display could not show the score and instead flashed 1.00. Comaneci went on to earn six more perfect scores at the Games and win three gold medals.
15. The first man to run a mile in under four minutes was British runner and NHS junior doctor Roger Bannister. On May 6, 1954, he completed a morning shift at St. Mary’s Hospital in London before catching a midday train to Oxford. Later that day, he ran the mile at Oxford’s Iffley Road track in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds, breaking a barrier many had considered unreachable.
16 Martha Cannon Defeats Her Husband
The first woman elected to a state senate in the United States was Welsh-American physician and suffragist Martha Hughes Cannon. A Mormon in a polygamous marriage, she was the fourth of six wives of prominent LDS leader Angus M. Cannon. In Utah’s November 3, 1896, election, Martha ran as a Democrat while Angus ran as a Republican for one of five at-large Senate seats. She received 10,288 votes to his 8,054, securing a seat while her husband lost his bid.
17. The first American to orbit Earth was astronaut John Glenn, who reportedly saw thousands of strange glowing particles outside Friendship 7 shortly after sunrise during his first orbit in 1962. He called the slow-moving specks “fireflies” before they vanished in brighter sunlight. Three months later, astronaut Scott Carpenter reproduced the effect by striking the wall of Aurora 7 and shaking loose tiny pieces of frost. The particles were frozen condensation from the capsule’s exterior, although later astronauts photographed their own frozen urine droplets similarly glittering in sunlight.
18. The first woman often credited with interviewing a U.S. president was American journalist Anne Royall, although the famous story of how she obtained the interview is probably apocryphal. According to the tale, Royall found President John Quincy Adams taking his customary nude morning swim in the Potomac River, gathered his clothes, and sat on them until he agreed to answer her questions.
19. The first woman to win an Olympic 100-meter title was American sprinter Betty Robinson, who claimed gold at the 1928 Amsterdam Games at age 16 in only her third 100-meter competition. In 1931, a plane crash left her severely injured, and her rescuer believed she was beyond saving and took her to Oak Forest infirmary because he knew the undertaker. Robinson spent six months in a wheelchair and two years regaining the ability to walk normally. Still unable to kneel for a standard sprint start, she returned at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and helped the United States win gold in the 4 x 100-meter relay.
20. The first single featuring rap vocals to top the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 was Blondie’s “Rapture.” Released in 1981, the new wave, disco, and hip-hop crossover spent two weeks at number one. Debbie Harry later said that members of groups including Wu-Tang Clan and Mobb Deep told her it was the first rap song they had heard.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Convicts Form Australia’s First Police
The first organized police unit in colonial Australia was staffed entirely by convicts. In August 1789, Governor Arthur Phillip selected eight of New South Wales’ best-behaved convicts to form a night watch that protected Sydney from thieves after dark. It was an early local law enforcement body rather than the modern New South Wales Police Force, which was formally established in 1862.
22. The first known person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease was a German woman named Auguste Deter. After she entered a Frankfurt psychiatric hospital in 1901, physician Alois Alzheimer found that she could state her first name but repeated “Auguste” when asked for her surname and lost track while trying to write it. Aware of her worsening confusion, she repeatedly said, “I have lost myself” (“Ich habe mich verloren”).
23. The first people to drive an automobile across the continental United States were physician Horatio Nelson Jackson and mechanic Sewall K. Crocker. In 1903, Jackson accepted a $50 wager that a car could cross the country in under 90 days, despite having little driving experience and not owning a car. They reached New York City after 63 days, 12 hours, and 30 minutes, having repaired their Winton repeatedly and replaced most of its original parts. When Jackson continued home to Burlington, Vermont, the drive chain, one of the few original parts remaining, snapped at the threshold of his garage.
24. The first speeding ticket was issued to a motorist zooming along at four times the legal limit. On January 28, 1896, Walter Arnold was caught driving his motorized vehicle through a Kent village at 8 mph, openly flouting the 2 mph restriction. A local police constable chased Arnold down on a regulation-issue bicycle for five miles before finally catching him and writing the citation.
25. The first machine gun was patented in 1718 with two distinct types of ammunition: round bullets for Christian enemies and square bullets for Muslim Turks. James Puckle designed his tripod-mounted, single-barreled flintlock weapon primarily as an anti-boarding gun for ships. According to Puckle’s patent, the square bullets were designed to cause more painful and severe wounds, meant to “convince the Turks of the benefits of Christian civilization.” Despite its innovation, the gun never saw combat, and only a few were ever produced.
