49 Fun Facts About Famous Firsts

Who was the first human to travel into space, in April 1961?

Yuri Gagarin called out "Poyekhali!" ("Off we go!") as the rocket lifted off from Baikonur.

How far did the first human spaceflight go?

One orbit of the Earth was the whole trip, and the cosmonaut never landed in his capsule: he ejected about 7 km up and came down under his own parachute.

Who was the first woman in space?

Valentina Tereshkova spent almost three days in orbit, logging more flight time on her one mission than all the American astronauts who had flown before her put together.

Who was the first American in space?

He named his Mercury capsule Freedom 7 and later hit golf balls on the Moon during Apollo 14.

Who was the first American woman in space?

Sally Ride had aimed at a professional tennis career before choosing physics at Stanford; she joined NASA in 1978 and flew on the shuttle five years later.

The first person to walk on the Moon commanded which mission?

Apollo 11's computer was steering for a boulder field beside a crater, so Neil Armstrong took manual control and flew on to find clear ground with fuel running low.

What was the first artificial Earth satellite?

Sputnik 1 set off such alarm in Washington that Congress held hearings and, within a year, created NASA.

Laika, the first animal to orbit the Earth, was what kind of animal?

A dog: Laika was a stray taken from the streets of Moscow. Soviet accounts said she lived for days, but in 2002 a mission scientist revealed she had died of overheating within hours.

How did the Wright brothers decide who would make their first powered flight attempt in December 1903?

They tossed a coin and Wilbur won, but he stalled the Flyer on 14 December. After repairs the next turn was Orville's, so he made the first flight three days later.

Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight was the first solo crossing of the Atlantic between which two cities?

New York and Paris were the terms of the $25,000 Orteig Prize for a nonstop flight between them. Lindbergh flew alone for 33.5 hours to claim it.

Aiming for Paris on her 1932 solo Atlantic flight, where did Amelia Earhart land instead?

Northern Ireland: icy weather and mechanical trouble brought her down in a pasture near Derry after 14 hours 56 minutes. It was enough to make her the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo and nonstop.

Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot, had to train in which country?

France was her only route: no American flight school would admit a Black woman, so Coleman learned French in Chicago, sailed in 1920 and earned her international licence in June 1921.

Who led the first party to reach the South Pole in December 1911?

Roald Amundsen let the world think he was sailing for the North Pole and told his crew the truth only at Madeira. His party reached the South Pole about five weeks ahead of Scott's.

Who accompanied Peary on the 1909 North Pole expedition and later said he got there first?

Matthew Henson was sent ahead as a scout and said his footprints were the first at the spot. The honours went to Peary, and Henson spent decades as a clerk in New York's Customs House.

News of the first ascent of Everest broke in Britain on the morning of which event?

Elizabeth II's coronation, on 2 June 1953: a Times reporter sent the news down the mountain in code so that rivals could not steal it, and it reached London just in time.

Junko Tabei was the first woman to climb Everest and the first woman to complete which challenge?

The Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent, took Junko Tabei until 1992. On Everest in 1975 she had survived an avalanche that hit her camp and gone on to the top.

In which English city did Roger Bannister run the first sub-four-minute mile, in May 1954?

Oxford, where Bannister had been a student, staged the race on its Iffley Road track. His 3 minutes 59.4 seconds ended a nine-year hold on the mile record by Sweden's Gunder Hägg.

Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, made his career as what?

A neurologist: Bannister was finishing medical school in London when he ran 3:59.4 in 1954, and he gave his working life to medicine rather than to sport.

Who was awarded the first US patent for the telephone in March 1876?

Alexander Graham Bell got the patent on 7 March 1876, before his device had carried a clear sentence. Three days later it did, when he called his assistant Watson in from the next room.

Who made the first long-distance car journey, in 1888, without telling her husband, the car's inventor?

Bertha Benz took her two teenage sons and drove to her mother's, stopping at a pharmacy to buy the cleaning solvent that the engine ran on.

In which country was the first practical car, a three-wheeler patented in 1886, built?

Germany: the three-wheeled Motorwagen was patented there in January 1886. Henry Ford, the usual guess, finished his first vehicle, the Quadricycle, ten years later in 1896.

In which country was Louise Brown, the first baby conceived through IVF, born in 1978?

Britain: she was born in Oldham after her parents had tried for nine years to conceive. The press called her a test-tube baby, though the egg was fertilised in a Petri dish.

Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?

Marie Curie was nearly left out: the 1903 physics nomination named only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel until a Swedish mathematician warned Pierre, and her name was added.

In 1960 Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world's first woman prime minister, leading which present-day country?

Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon: her husband, the prime minister, was assassinated in 1959, and his party persuaded her to lead it into the 1960 election.

Who was the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court?

Sandra Day O'Connor joined the court in 1981, twelve years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the usual guess. Fresh from Stanford Law in 1952, she found no firm would hire a woman as an attorney; one offered her a job as a secretary.

Who was the first woman to serve in a US presidential cabinet?

Frances Perkins ran the Labor Department for all twelve years of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency and helped draft the Social Security Act.

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the US Congress in 1916, represented which state?

Montana gave its women the vote in 1914, after a campaign Rankin helped lead, so she won her seat four years before the Nineteenth Amendment. She went on to vote against entering both world wars.

Which vice president broke a record from 1832 for tie-breaking Senate votes?

Kamala Harris, the first woman in the job, passed the 31 that John Calhoun had cast by 1832 and left office on 33. Joe Biden, in eight years as vice president, never cast one.

Before the US presidency, Barack Obama was the first Black president of which institution?

The Harvard Law Review elected him in 1990, and the national attention brought a contract for a book on race relations. It became his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Jackie Robinson broke MLB's colour line in 1947 playing for which team?

The Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base because Eddie Stanky held second. Stanky was traded away before the 1948 season, and Robinson took over second base.

Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar for which film?

Gone with the Wind won her Best Supporting Actress in 1940, yet at the ceremony she was seated at a small segregated table against the far wall of the room.

Sidney Poitier became the first Black actor to win the Best Actor Oscar for which film?

Lilies of the Field cast him as Homer Smith, who helps a group of nuns build a chapel. In the Heat of the Night, the usual guess, won Best Actor for his co-star Rod Steiger instead.

Halle Berry became the first Black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar for which film?

Monster's Ball won it in 2002, and she began her speech by dedicating the moment to Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne and Diahann Carroll.

Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar for which film?

The Hurt Locker, a low-budget Iraq war film, beat Avatar, the blockbuster directed by her former husband James Cameron, to both Best Director and Best Picture in 2010.

Toni Morrison, first Black woman to win the Literature Nobel, wrote which novel?

Beloved grew from a real case: Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in 1856 and killed her young daughter rather than see her taken back.

Nellie Bly circled the globe in 72 days, setting out in 1889 to beat which fictional traveller?

Phileas Fogg needed 80 days in Jules Verne's novel and Bly was home in 72. Her paper, the New York World, ran a contest to guess her time, with a trip to Europe as the prize.

How did reporter Nellie Bly get inside the New York asylum she exposed in 1887?

She feigned insanity so well that doctors committed her to the asylum on Blackwell's Island. Her ten days inside, written up for the New York World, led to a grand-jury investigation.

How did Charles Blondin first cross the Niagara Gorge?

On a tightrope, in 1859: he went on to repeat it blindfolded, on stilts, pushing a wheelbarrow, carrying a man on his back, and once stopping midway to cook an omelette.

In 1901, on her 63rd birthday, Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to survive what?

Niagara Falls in a barrel: the schoolteacher hoped fame would secure her old age, and claimed to be in her forties. Records later showed she was 63.

Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman in space, died aboard which shuttle in 2003?

Columbia broke up over Texas sixteen minutes from landing, because foam had struck its left wing at liftoff sixteen days earlier. The same orbiter had carried her first flight, in 1997.

The first American woman in space flew both her missions on which shuttle?

Challenger carried her in 1983 and again in 1984. She was training for a third flight when it was lost in January 1986, and she then served on the inquiry into the disaster.

What did the Soviet Union's first satellite transmit that let people around the world track it?

Radio beeps were all it sent, for three weeks until the batteries died. What most people saw crossing the night sky was its spent rocket stage: the satellite itself was barely visible.

The first man to reach the South Pole had earlier led the first transit of which waterway?

The Northwest Passage fell to him and a crew of six in a small sloop, the Gjøa, between 1903 and 1906. In the 1840s it had cost Franklin's navy expedition both ships and all 129 men.

Who made the first spacewalk, in March 1965?

Alexei Leonov floated outside Voskhod 2 for about twelve minutes, then had to bleed air from his ballooning suit to squeeze back into the airlock. Ed White, the usual guess, was the first American, that June.

The first married couple to win a Nobel Prize studied what?

Radioactivity was the couple's own word for it. Pierre and his wife took half of the 1903 physics prize, and Henri Becquerel, who first spotted the rays, took the other half.

Christiaan Barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant in December 1967 in which city?

Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital was the setting. Patient Louis Washkansky lived only 18 days, killed by pneumonia after the anti-rejection drugs wrecked his immunity.

In 1926, who became the first woman to swim the English Channel?

Gertrude Ederle swam from France to England through rough seas and still beat the fastest man's time by almost two hours.

The first Winter Olympic Games were held in 1924 in which French resort?

Chamonix staged it as an International Winter Sports Week. Only afterwards did the IOC recognise the event as the first Winter Olympics.

Which French inventor produced the oldest surviving camera photograph, using bitumen in the 1820s?

Nicéphore Niépce left a pewter plate in his camera for hours, perhaps days, to catch the view from his window. Louis Daguerre, the usual guess, became his partner in 1829.