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As they say, there is a first time for everything.
From cities to national park these are some crazy firsts in history that
you would never have guessed!
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First skyscraper - The Home Insurance Building was erected in Chicago in
1884 and has been called the “Father of the Modern Skyscraper”. It was
10 stories high.
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First solo person to circumnavigate the globe using only human power -
Erden Eruc of Turkey walked and rowed right around the world!
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First human to be killed by a robot - On
January 25 1979 Robert Williams died when he was hit in the head by a
mechanical arm at a Ford casting plant.
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First national park - Yellowstone in the USA was the first national park
on Earth. President Ulysses S Grant declared it a protected area in
1872.
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First action movie, fiction film, and American Western - The 1903 film
The Great Train Robbery was 10 minutes long and had 14 scenes.
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First person to reach the North Pole alone and on foot - Although Sir
Wally Herbert of the UK was the first confirmed person to reach the
North Pole in 1969, Børge Ousland of Norway walked there by himself in
1994!
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First automatic weapon - In 1883 Sir Hiram Maxim created the Maxim gun.
The world’s first machine gun would go on to revolutionize warfare and
was used in both World Wars.
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First supercomputer - Cray-1, the world’s first supercomputer was
installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States in
1976. It cost $8.8 million.
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First animal to receive two bionic leg implants - In June 2010 Oscar the
cat received his bionic limbs after losing them to a combine harvester.
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First video game - Often a source of controversy, if
you bypass the whole digital thing, the first time any game was played
on a screen was in 1947. Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann
created something called the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device. It was a
missile simulator that used analog circuitry.
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First extraterrestrial tornadoes (dust devils) - So
it’s obviously not the first time a tornado touched down on another
planet but when the Viking spacecraft recorded dust devils on Mars’s
surface in the 1970s it was the first time we had proof!
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First road map - Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar
commissioned the first known road maps to be created, not surprisingly
because the Romans were famous for the roads they built. It took nearly
twenty years to complete the first map!
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First watch - The first officially produced
portable/wearable clock was the Nuremberg Egg. It was designed by Peter
Hemlein of Germany in 1509.
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First aerial bombardment - In 1849 the Austrians
launched several hundred unmanned balloons with the intention of
dropping time-triggered bombs over Venice, (modern day) Italy. Winds
were not in their favor and there were very few casualties.
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First city - Going all the way back to 3200 BC Uruk,
located in Mesopatamia (Iraq), is often considered the first city. It
had nearly 50,000 inhabitants, a thick wall, and was a center of trade
and commerce.
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