Firsts

In 2737 B.C., a Chinese emperor named Shen Nung was boiling a pot of water over a fire. One of the leaves from the fire floated into the pot. When the emperor drank the water, he found that it tasted delicious. What kind of leaf was it that gave the water its flavor? The leaf […]

Vanilla and chocolate have a lot in common. Both come from a bean, and both are natives of Mexico and Central America. In fact, when Europeans first tasted vanilla, they tasted it together with chocolate! When Spanish explorers arrived in Mexico, the Indians there offered them a chocolate drink cooled with snow (from the mountains) […]

Before Columbus set sail for America, no one in Europe had ever even heard of chocolate! It wasn’t until Spanish explorers reached Mexico, where Cocoa beans were first grown, that Europeans were introduced to chocolate. It was the Aztec Indians of Mexico who showed the Spanish how to make a drink from Cocoa beans, and […]

Today, most of the olives we eat come from Spain or Italy. But the original home of the olive tree is in the Middle East, where it was common all around the Mediterranean Sea by biblical times. Traders later brought olive tree seeds and cuttings to Europe and North Africa. Olives are never eaten fresh […]

In 1874, a man named Robert Green was selling cold drinks at a fair in Philadelphia. His drink, called an egg cream, was made from cream, flavoring syrup, and carbonated water. When Green ran out of cream, he put in vanilla ice cream instead. People who sampled the new dish loved it, and the “ice […]

It may sound strange, but ice cream has been around a lot longer than refrigerators and freezers. In ancient times, Roman emperors had snow brought to their palace from nearby mountains, and their cooks mixed it with honey and fruit juices to form an iced dessert. Then in the 13th century, Marco Polo returned to […]

The earliest lamps that we know about were used by primitive people, perhaps earlier than 50,000 B.C. These lamps consisted of a hollowed piece of stone filled with animal fat or vegetable oil, such as olive or nut oil. A piece of moss was inserted into the oil, then lit from a fire. The moss […]

In 1929, a group called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to give awards for the best movie and acting performances of the year. The award trophy was a statuette of a man. When a secretary at the Academy first saw the statuette, she said it looked just like her uncle Oscar. […]

In 1932, a man named Richard Hollingshead set up a screen in front of his garage in Riverton, New Jersey, and sat in his car to watch a movie. He did this so that he could become the first person to watch a movie from a car, and thereby get a patent on the idea, […]

Early movies didn’t have sound. A piano player in the theater played music along with the film, and there were no spoken words in any movie. The actors’ words were flashed on the screen in between scenes. Then in 1926, a movie called Don Juan appeared with a sound track. But the sound track was […]

In the early days of movies, people were so thrilled by the sight of moving pictures that they didn’t really care what they saw on the screen. The earliest films were very short and showed ordinary things: couples dancing, men fighting, speeding trains, or else just pictures of famous people such as Buffalo Bill and […]

During the 1890s, when movies were new, there was no such thing as a movie theater. Films were usually shown between acts at live stage shows. But then an enterprising man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, took over an empty store, put in 92 seats, a screen, and a piano, and opened the first real movie theater […]

Thomas Edison invented the first motion picture machine in 1889, but Edison’s machine was a lot different from the projector we use today. In Edison’s machine, a strip of film was moved across a light source, and the viewer had to stare into a small window in the machine to see the moving images. Then […]

By the 1870s, a few men in Europe and America had built machines that could spin wheels of photographs so quickly that they looked as if the people in the photos were moving. But no one had really invented what we would call motion pictures. Then in 1872, a wealthy man named Leland Stanford wanted […]

The first moving picture ever shown to an audience was the work of two French brothers, the Lumieres. Their first film, showing workers leaving a factory, was shown in Paris on March 22, 1895. But it’s possible that another man may have shown moving figures on a blank wall as early as 1885, in a […]

Today, the sound of bagpipes probably reminds most people of Scotland or Ireland. But this instrument was not invented in either of these places. Bagpipes are an ancient instrument, used by the Persians before the time of Christ, and perhaps much earlier in Egypt. Bagpipes were used in ancient Greece, and the Roman Emperor Nero […]

Many Americans think that Scotland Yard is a detective force serving all of Britain, a kind of English FBI. But it isn’t. Scotland Yard is actually the name of a branch of the London police force, and it most often does not get involved in police cases outside the area of London. In the 10th […]

There was no such thing as the crossword puzzle in ancient times. But the Greeks, Romans, and other peoples had a kind of word game called the word square that would lead to the invention of the crossword puzzle many years later. A word square is a group of three or more words arranged in […]

Dictionaries haven’t always been on hand to show us the meaning of words we don’t know. The first English book that was called a dictionary wasn’t written until 1552. And the first English dictionary listing ordinary words as well as difficult words was published in 1702. About 50 years later, the renowned English writer Samuel […]

Unlike most other languages, English was born out of a combination of two languages. The Anglo-Saxons, the people who settled in England during the fifth century, spoke a German language we now call “Old English.” Then in the 11th century, England was conquered by French-speaking people from Normandy, and French became the official language of […]

No one knows where playing cards really came from. Some people think it was China, others believe it was India, and still others claim it was the Near East. Cards didn’t reach Europe until around 1300. But from the very beginning, almost all decks of playing cards had four suits. The names of the suits […]

No one knows exactly where the game of billiards was invented. Some say it was in ancient Greece, others say China or France, and still others say England. According to the people who think it was invented in England, this is how it happened: A game called lawn bowling was very popular in England during […]

The board game called backgammon is one of the most popular games in America today, with more than two million regular players. Yet this game isn’t as popular today as it was more than 2,000 years ago! No one person invented backgammon. It evolved from a number of old games that were played in the […]

Cubes with numbers or spots on their sides have been used since ancient times by people in almost all parts of the world. Dice are so old that we don’t even know when or where they were invented, because they have been around since before man learned how to write! Primitive people probably made the […]

Most people think that golf was invented in Scotland, but there’s no proof that it was born there. The ancient Romans played a game with bent wooden sticks and a leather ball stuffed with feathers. In the Middle Ages, the Dutch played a game called kolven on frozen rivers and canals, using a wooden club […]

It’s possible that the skateboard was invented during the 1940s or the 1950s. But the skateboard didn’t really attract any attention until 1962, when a surfer in California attached roller-skate wheels to a board and began selling the skateboards to other surfers, who used them to practice certain moves used in surfing. But then, many […]

Roller skating began around the middle of the 18th century, when an unknown man in The Netherlands made a pair of skates with wooden wheels. Most likely, the inventor fashioned the skates so that he could practice ice-skating techniques during the warm months. The first pair of roller skates offered for sale appeared in Belgium […]

Ice skates are a lot older than you might think. The oldest ice skates that still exist today come from Sweden, and were made sometime between the years 700 and 900. But early Swedish writing, dating from around the year 150, mentions ice skates. And some people think that ice skates may have been in […]

During the 19th century, soccer was a popular sport at many English schools. In soccer, a player is not allowed to touch the ball with his hands. But then in 1823, a young student at the Rugby school picked up the ball during a match and ran with it. Word spread through England of what […]

Many sports stadiums are now covered by domes, but the first domed stadium ever built was the Astrodome, in Houston, Texas. Completed in 1965, the Astrodome was the largest indoor arena ever built until that time, and its steel-and-plastic covering was the largest dome the world had ever seen. The Astrodome was also the first […]

The games of horseshoe pitching and quoits are very similar. In horseshoes, players toss horseshoes toward a stake in the ground; in quoits, they toss rings toward a stake. Some people think quoits came from horseshoes, but it was really the other way around. Roman soldiers used iron rings to play quoits 2,000 years ago. […]

During the 1890s, basketball was becoming the most popular gym game in America. But basketball was not a good sport for older people to play, because of the running involved in the game. So in 1895, William Morgan, a gym teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts, decided to invent a new game that would be good for […]

In 1891, a gym teacher in Springfield Massachusetts, wanted to invent a new game for his gym students to make exercising more fun. The teacher, James Naismith, set up a court like the modern basketball court, and called for square boxes at each end that players would have to try to throw the ball into. […]

Professional baseball teams in America appeared in 1869, and by 1880, baseball cards were around already! The first baseball cards weren’t for young people, though, because they were included in packs of cigarettes and tobacco. In 1933, bubble-gum companies began to give out baseball cards with their products. For a while, there were many different […]

Professional baseball’s National League was formed in 1876, with eight teams, and was the only league in America until 1893, when the Western League was formed. Then in 1901, some of the teams from the Western League joined to form a new league, the American League, with eight teams. After the 1903 season, the winners […]

Until the 1880s, Americans played baseball for fun, without pay, and baseball “clubs” were set up in many cities. Then in 1869, a group of players organized the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team in America. The Red Stockings went on a tour of the country, charging admission to see their games. During […]

Most people think that baseball was invented by the American Abner Doubleday during the 19th century. But baseball is actually much older than that, and it came from England, not America! In past centuries, a game called rounders was played in England, with rules something like those of baseball. Some English people even called this […]

In the 19th century, a game similar to tennis was played in India. It was called poona. Poona was brought to England by English soldiers stationed in India. Then in 1873, the English Duke of Beaufort held a party at Badminton, his country estate, where a slightly different form of this game was played for […]

Tennis players never say a player’s score is “zero” or “nothing” when that player hasn’t scored a point in a game. They say “love” instead. No one knows for sure how this word came into use, but it probably happened like this: Centuries ago, French tennis players drew zeroes on their scoresheets that were oval […]

During the Middle Ages, priests in France played a game called court tennis, a game that was to become the father of modern tennis. Court tennis was played indoors, on a court with four walls, and the players hit the ball with their hands instead of a racket. Late in the 15th century, players began […]

Holland may be the “Land of Windmills,” but that doesn’t mean windmills were invented in The Netherlands and used only in that country. The first windmills in Holland appeared before the 12th century, but they also appeared in Spain and other countries at the same time. And the first windmill that we know about was […]

String instruments, such as the lute and the lyre, came from Asia in ancient times. Then the bow came to Europe from Persia. In the Middle Ages, musicians in Europe played a number of string instruments with the bow, including one called the rebec, which had two or three strings. In the 15th century, a […]

New York made the skyscraper famous, but the first skyscraper ever built was not in New York. It was in Chicago. And in both places it was the high cost of land and the shortage of space that made “building up” more practical than “building out.” The way a building is constructed, and not just […]

We think of apartment buildings as modern inventions. But there were many apartment buildings in ancient Rome, more than 2,000 years ago! Roman apartment buildings often rose to a height of five or six stories. The Romans called these buildings “islands.” Perhaps the Romans could have built their apartments higher, but the Emperor Augustus declared […]

During the 18th century, there were many different systems of measurement in Europe. One of them was the English system, using inches, feet, and miles, which we in America still use today. In 1791, a group of French scientists proposed a new measurement system based on the number ten. The new system would be easier […]

Today, most air conditioning is used to bring comfort to people indoors on hot days, but that’s not the reason it was invented. In 1902, a man named Willis Carrier was asked to find a way to remove moisture from the air in a New York picture-printing plant. Since paper absorbs moisture from the air, […]

Many people think that the first subway in the world was built in New York City. But New York’s subway was actually the world’s sixth! The world’s first subway was built in London, and opened in 1863. It was 31/4 miles long, and the cars were pulled by locomotives burning coal in the tunnels! London […]

Origami is the art of folding pieces of paper into shapes of animals, birds, flowers, and other objects. This art probably began in China sometime after the invention of paper. The Chinese made paper houses, furniture, and other things to be burned at a person’s funeral, in the hope that the dead person would enjoy […]

Most people probably think that the tulip came from Holland. And while it’s true that Holland is now the biggest producer of tulips in the world, the flower actually came from Asia and some areas on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The first tulip didn’t reach Holland until 1562! In the 1630s, the demand […]

Roses have flourished on earth for millions of years, and were cultivated by man since very early times. The cultivated rose is so old that we don’t even know where it was first grown! The Egyptians planted rose gardens in their palaces as early as 3000 B.C. The ancient Romans made wine from roses. The […]

Since no Europeans had seen corn before Columbus discovered the New World, it’s not surprising that the first popcorn was made in America. The first white men to enjoy popcorn, in fact, were the settlers who attended the first Thanksgiving dinner, in December, 1621. The Indians showed them how to make it. Popcorn comes from […]

In ancient Europe, there was no such thing as a zero. The numbers used by the ancient Romans were really letters that stood for certain numbers; V was 5, X was 10, and C was 100. But in the 10th century, a number system from the East came to Europe, along with the zero. In […]

You can imagine how hard it must have been to do business in ancient times, before numbers were invented. To show a quantity, tradesmen used their fingers or bags of stones. For instance, a person who wanted to buy five sheep might put five stones in a bag. The word calculate, in fact, comes from […]