1 Thurgood Marshall Memorized The Constitution
The first Black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, began studying the Constitution after his high school principal made him read it as punishment for a prank. He memorized sections of the document, taking particular interest in Article III and the Bill of Rights. President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1967.
2. The first non-white man in NBA history was Wataru Misaka, a Japanese-American point guard who stood 5 feet 7 inches tall. The New York Knicks drafted him in 1947, when they played in the Basketball Association of America, a predecessor of the NBA. He played three games and scored seven points before the Knicks released him. Misaka died in Salt Lake City on November 20, 2019, at age 95.
3. The first American recipients of France’s high military honor for heroism, the Croix de Guerre with Palm, included Henry Johnson, a Harlem Hellfighter nicknamed “Black Death.” During a German raid in the Argonne Forest in May 1918, he continued fighting with his rifle butt and a bolo knife after his rifle jammed. Accounts credit him with killing four Germans and wounding an estimated 10 to 20 while rescuing a fellow soldier, despite suffering 21 wounds himself. The United States awarded him the Medal of Honor posthumously in 2015.
4. The first African-American man to practice medicine in the United States, James Derham, learned his profession while assisting several doctors who enslaved him during the 1700s. One of them, New Orleans physician Robert Dove, eventually granted him his freedom. With financial help from Dove, Derham opened his own medical practice despite never earning a medical degree.
5. The first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany was Dorothy Thompson, who interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1931 while reporting from Europe. She later described him as “insecure” and “the very prototype of the little man.” Her critical reporting, including her book I Saw Hitler, led the Nazi regime to order her expulsion in 1934. On August 25, a Gestapo agent delivered the order to her Berlin hotel, giving her 24 hours to leave.
6 McDonald’s Drive-Through Served Uniformed Soldiers
The first McDonald’s drive-through opened in Sierra Vista, Arizona, in January 1975 to serve soldiers who could not enter the restaurant in uniform. Troops from nearby Fort Huachuca had to change into civilian clothes before going inside. Franchise owner David Rich installed a sliding window in the restaurant wall so they could buy food without leaving their vehicles.
7. The first dog to receive the VITA Wireless Samaritan Award, an honor recognizing lifesaving cellphone use, was a service beagle named Belle. In 2006, her owner, a man named Kevin Weaver, collapsed during a diabetic seizure. Belle bit his cellphone’s 9 key, activating its 911 speed dial and summoning emergency help.
8. The first Native American band to reach the Billboard Hot 100’s top five was Redbone, whose 1974 hit “Come and Get Your Love” peaked at No. 5. Founded by brothers Pat and Lolly Vegas in 1969, the band reached a new generation of fans when the song appeared in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
9. The first and only case of its kind that psychiatrist Ikechukwu Azuonye had encountered involved a woman identified as AB. In 1984, she reported hearing reassuring voices that told her she had a brain tumor and directed her to a London hospital for a scan. Doctors discovered and removed a meningioma, after which she said the voices told her, “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.” The voices disappeared, and she reported remaining well 12 years later.
10. The first man to show a hurricane’s radar image on television was American journalist Dan Rather during Hurricane Carla in 1961. Reporting from Galveston, Texas, he overlaid a transparent map on the radar screen so viewers could understand the storm’s size. His coverage brought him national attention and helped persuade more than 350,000 people to evacuate, an evacuation that is believed to have saved thousands of lives.
11 Diocletian Retired To Grow Cabbages
The first Roman emperor to voluntarily retire was Diocletian, who stepped down in AD 305 after a serious illness. He spent his retirement growing cabbages in his palace gardens on the Dalmatian coast. When urged to return to power in AD 308, he reportedly replied, “If you could see the cabbages I have planted here with my own hands, you surely would never have thought to request this.”
12. The first 3D first-person shooter is generally believed to have been Maze, created by Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer in 1973. It allowed players to shoot one another and peek around corners, while a 1974 MIT expansion added simple computer-controlled opponents and support for up to eight players. The game later spread across ARPANET, where reports claim DARPA banned it after Maze consumed half the communication traffic between MIT and Stanford.
13. The first metal recording selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry was Metallica’s 1986 album Master of Puppets. The Library of Congress placed it in the 2015 registry after deeming it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Its selection was publicly announced in March 2016 as one of 25 new additions to the registry.
14. The first product reportedly arranged for sale over ARPANET was marijuana. In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students used accounts at their artificial intelligence laboratory to arrange a cannabis deal with students at MIT through the internet’s precursor.
15. The first person to visit both space and Challenger Deep was American astronaut and oceanographer Kathy Sullivan. She became the first American woman to perform a spacewalk in 1984, then descended to the deepest known point in Earth’s oceans on June 7, 2020, aboard the submersible Limiting Factor. The dive also made her the first woman to reach Challenger Deep. Sullivan’s status as the only person to achieve both ended in March 2021, when private astronaut Richard Garriott followed her.
16 Hofmann’s First Intentional LSD Trip
The first intentional LSD trip was undertaken by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann on April 19, 1943. Hofmann had first synthesized LSD in 1938 and accidentally absorbed a small amount on April 16, 1943, becoming the first person known to experience its psychedelic effects. Three days later, he deliberately ingested 0.25 mg (250 micrograms) and, after the effects began, rode home through Basel with his laboratory assistant. The event is now commemorated as Bicycle Day.
17. The first American bank owned by a Native American tribe was Blackfeet National Bank, which Elouise Cobell, also known as “Yellow Bird Woman,” helped establish in 1987. While serving as treasurer of the Blackfeet Nation, Cobell noticed that income from leases and resources on Native American land did not match federal accounting records. In 1996, she became the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit accusing the U.S. government of mismanaging trust funds belonging to more than 300,000 Native Americans. The case produced a $3.4 billion settlement that received final approval in 2011.
18. The first Indian restaurant in Britain opened roughly 50 years before the country’s first fish-and-chip shop. Indian entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomed founded the Hindoostane Coffee House in London in 1810, serving curries, offering hookah pipes, and delivering meals to customers’ homes. Eastern European Jewish immigrant Joseph Malin is widely credited with opening Britain’s first fish-and-chip shop in London’s East End around 1860.
19. The first chimpanzee to start the grass-in-ear trend documented at Zambia’s Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage was a female named Julie. In 2010, she began placing a stiff blade of grass in one ear and leaving it there during other activities, despite the behavior having no apparent practical purpose. Researchers later observed 8 of the 12 chimpanzees in her group doing the same, while the behavior appeared only once among 82 chimpanzees in three neighboring groups. The researchers called it a group-specific arbitrary tradition, while popular coverage likened it to chimpanzee fashion.
20. The first woman to serve as a mayor in the United States was Susanna Madora Salter, who won the election in Argonia, Kansas, on April 4, 1887, at age 27. Several men placed her name on the Prohibition Party ticket without her knowledge as a joke, expecting her defeat to humiliate the local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and discourage women from politics. Once the scheme became known, temperance supporters and local Republicans rallied behind Salter, giving her a two-thirds majority and turning the prank into a historic victory.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Clifford Stoll Tracked KGB Hacker
The first known case of state-sponsored hacking was uncovered in 1986 by Clifford Stoll, an astronomer working as a system administrator at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. While investigating a $0.75 discrepancy in computer-use accounts, he discovered an intruder and spent nearly a year tracking his movements across military and government networks. The intruder was Markus Hess, a West German hacker whose associates sold stolen information to the Soviet KGB. Stoll’s investigation marked an early milestone in digital forensics, later chronicled in his 1989 book, The Cuckoo’s Egg.
22. The first child-protection agency in the world was the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, organized in 1874 and incorporated in 1875. It grew out of the case of an abused girl named Mary Ellen McCormack, whose plight church worker Etta Wheeler brought to ASPCA founder Henry Bergh. Bergh and ASPCA lawyer Elbridge Gerry helped remove Mary Ellen from her guardian and secure a criminal conviction, then joined philanthropist John D. Wright in establishing the new society.
23. The first person to register for the first recorded official comic book convention was future fantasy author George R.R. Martin. He was 15 when he bought ticket number one for the New York Comicon, held at Manhattan’s Workman’s Circle Building on July 24, 1964. The one-day gathering attracted more than 100 fans and featured comic-book figures including Steve Ditko, Flo Steinberg, and Tom Gill.
24. The first electorate in the world to give women both the vote and the right to stand for parliament was South Australia. During debate on the suffrage bill, conservative opponents added parliamentary candidacy rights as a wrecking amendment, assuming the expanded proposal would be too radical to pass. Instead, the bill passed 31 votes to 14 on December 18, 1894, and became law in 1895, giving South Australian women equal political rights.
25. The first female cryptanalyst in the United States was Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a self-taught codebreaker who cracked hundreds of ciphers for the government. During World War II, her Coast Guard team monitored Nazi agents reporting Allied ship movements from South America and, by December 1942, had broken three Enigma systems and exposed a network led by SS officer Johannes Siegfried Becker. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover later presented the operation as an FBI triumph without crediting Friedman, who was bound by a secrecy oath and died in 1980 without publicly correcting the record. Her role remained largely hidden until the government declassified the relevant files in 2008.
