Colossal questions.
Who invented music?
Music is just about as old as humanity itself,
and maybe even older.
The very first musical instrument was most likely
the human voice, which is full of musical sounds
like singing, humming, clicking, and whistling.
Over the years, archaeologists have dug up
a few injured instruments like flutes
made of swan or mammoth bones that are around 30,000 years
old.
The absolute oldest known instrument
is called the Divje Babe flute, which was
uncovered in Slovenia in 1995.
The flute is carved out of a cave bear femur
and has four holes enough to play a full musical scale.
The flute is anywhere between 50,000 and 60,000 years old.
It's so old, in fact, that it was even
carved by a completely different species of human.
That's right.
The Divje Babe flute is the only instrument ever uncovered
that was made by Neanderthals.
The oldest known song isn't nearly as old
as the first instruments.
It's only about 3,500 years old and was
written in an ancient language called cuneiform.
The song is called Hurrian Hymn number 6.
And while there were certainly songs written down before it,
it's the oldest song to survive until today.
The hymn is written on clay tablets
and even includes specific instructions
for how to play the song on the lyre,
a nine-stringed guitar-like instrument.
Ever since, music has grown and changed and blossom
into an indelible part of life.
Who invented wheelchairs?
No one can say for sure when the very first wheelchair was made,
but we do know that they've been around for a pretty long time.
The oldest known wheeled furniture
comes from a stone engraving on an ancient Chinese tablet
that's more than 2,500 years old.
This ancient version of a wheelchair
was basically a wheelbarrow that was refitted to carry someone
around.
Not ideal, but people used what they had access to.
It was another 1,000 years or so before wheeled seats
made specifically to carry people
with disabilities around started to show up in Chinese art.
The only problem was these chairs still
needed to be pushed by someone else.
Over in Europe, there weren't many options
all the way up until the late 1500s
when a similar design to the ancient Chinese version
was finally developed and only because the King of Spain
needed one.
It was a chair truly fit for a king
with elaborate armrests, footrests, plush cushions,
and gold accents.
It basically looked like a giant lounge chair with wheels
to push him around like, well, a king.
So this invention was a lot more like a portable throne
than a modern day self-propelling wheelchair.
Those finally came along about 50 years later in 1655.
That was the year a 22-year-old German watchmaker named
Stephan Farffler built the world's
first self-propelling wheelchair.
His design was intense, almost like an oversized boxcar
with three wheels like a tricycle.
The person in the chair would move themselves
with a series of cranks, cods, levers, and gears
that were turned like bike pedals to make the device move.
Around the mid-1700s, the bath chair
was popularized, which was very similar to Farffler's
original design, just smaller and less boxy-looking.
Throughout the 1800s, several improvements
made these newfangled wheelchairs even better,
like rear push wheels and casters,
which are wheels that can swivel like on a shopping cart.
Eventually, hollow rubber wheels were added.
Then push rims a few years later.
Push rims are metal rings attached to the chair
that help make it much easier to push.
In 1932, a sleeker steel version of the wheelchair
was invented, which was foldable and more lightweight.
In the mid-50s, a mass produced electric wheelchair finally
hit the market.
Nowadays, inventors around the world are working to come up
with cutting edge ways to give wheelchairs more
state-of-the-art technology.
Today, doctors can even implant a device
that allows patients to move their chairs around just
by thinking.
And who knows what other breakthroughs will
come in the next 30 years.
Who invented books?
The very first forms of writing date back
almost 6,000 years ago to an ancient people called
the Sumerians who started etching in their early alphabet
into moist clay tablets using a triangular tool
called a calimus.
The clay was then fired in a kiln to harden.
This new ability, writing things down, proved to be popular.
And for the next 1,000 or so years,
tablets were the only good way to do it.
That's until papyrus scrolls came along.
The oldest known scrolls date back to ancient Egypt,
almost 4,500 years ago.
Papyrus is a thick material made from thin strands
of papyrus plant stem glued together
that's more like a fabric than a paper.
This was an upgrade from the heavy clay tablets,
but scrolls still weren't simple.
They were usually between 10 and 50 feet long
and usually took two hands to use because they were so heavy.
The papyrus would also crack easily.
But before long, the Romans had a solution.
They created the codex, which sounds like a secret gadget,
but is just a series of scrolls that
were bound together and opened like a book.
The wooden covers protected the pages,
which were now made from a material called parchment
made from animal skins.
Over in China, the earliest books
were made of thin pieces of bamboo bound together
with hemp, silk, or leather.
Sometime between 618 and 907, the very first books
were printed in China.
They were made using a time-consuming method called
woodblock printing where the words are carved into wood
and stamped onto pages.
In the 1040s, a Chinese man named
Bi Sheng invented movable type printing, which
used premade character blocks made of ceramic or clay.
This design would later be improved
on by Johannes Gutenberg who invented the printing press.
This changed everything because for the first time,
books were mass-produced quickly.
Before the printing press, people only copied
a couple pages per day, but now with thousands of pages
could be produced.
That means that books and the incredible knowledge
they can contain became available for more
and more people at cheaper and cheaper prices.
Today, books are all made from using the same basic process.
The words are printed on big sheets
of paper, which are cut into smaller pages double the length
of a book.
Those pages are then folded in half and sewn together.
Finally, the sewn and folded pages are cut to final size
and glued to the spine of the book's cover.
Today, what we think of as a book is always changing.
Ebooks, audiobooks and other digital readers
are becoming a bigger and bigger part of daily life.
But most experts agree that physical bound books will never
go away completely.
Who invented fast food?
Like many of the greatest inventions,
no one person invented fast food by themselves.
The very earliest versions of fast food
could be found all around the ancient world.
Most average Romans lived in apartment buildings
without full-fledged Kitchens and would mostly
rely on vendors and ready made meals.
Almost 1,000 years ago, people in China
would buy snacks from vendors like fried dough, soup,
or stuffed buns, all of which are eaten to this day.
During the Middle Ages, regular people
living in big cities like London and Paris
mostly ate food they bought from vendors or storefronts, pies,
waffles, pastries, cookies, pancakes, and cooked meats.
But the modern fast food industry we see today
really began in the United Kingdom in the mid-1800s.
That's when the British favorite fish and chips was invented.
You see, fish and chips were a convenient, cheap, easy to make
snack that became an everyday meal among the working
class of England.
By 1920, there were over 35,000 fish and chip
shops across the UK.
And in 1928, the very first fish and chip fast food chain
restaurant opened its doors.
Around the same time in the United States,
the burger joint White Castle was founded in Wichita, Kansas.
It's generally considered the second fast food
chain and the first hamburger chain White Castle was
super successful from day one and led
to a ton of competitors.
You've probably heard of some of those competitors
because the fast food industry took off from there,
spawning dozens of hyper successful fast food chains
that operate in more than 100 countries across the world.
So that's how fast food was invented.
Now, whether or not it's healthy for you,
that's a whole other question entirely.
Who invented basketball?
Unlike most other popular pro sports
today, basketball can actually trace its origin
back to one single person, a guy named James Naismith.
Back in 1891, Mr. Naismith was fresh out of college
and working as a gym teacher at a local YMCA in Springfield,
Massachusetts.
That winter was particularly cold and snowy so his class
was stuck inside for gym every day for months.
And over time, the kids began to get rowdier and rowdier.
So James Naismith's boss gave him a project,
try and solve the problem by inventing a brand new game
that kids can play indoors to help them
drain all that pent up energy.
Naismith was given just two weeks to invent his game
and was given a few guidelines.
The game couldn't take up too much space,
it couldn't be too rough, and it had
to help keep the school's track athletes in shape.
So James Naismith started devising his brand new sport
from scratch.
And he began with the ball.
He decided a hard ball like a baseball or golf ball
was too dangerous.
So he modeled it on a soft soccer ball instead.
Next, he raised the goal well above the players' heads.
This forced them to softly lob the ball into the goal
instead of hurling it, which took skill and was safer.
Naismith decided to call his new sport basketball
because he fashioned the goals out of old beach baskets.
According to Naismith, most of the fouls
called in the first game were for running with the ball
or for tackling an opponent.
After every single score, the game
would pause while someone fished the ball out
of the basket with a ladder and the ball
would be tipped off at the center of the court.
The first rules also didn't include the dribble.
The only way a player could move the ball up the court
was by passing.
So players quickly invented a strategy
of passing to themselves by tossing the ball in the air
while they run around.
By 1905, the original peach basket design
was replaced with the nets we know today.
Other innovations like the shot clock, the slam dunk,
and the three-pointer have all helped turn basketball
into the mega-popular sport we love today.
So the next time your favorite player
knocks down a game-winning three,
you can thank James Naismith for his snowden stroke of genius.
Who invented Braille?
It turns out the Braille writing system was invented
by a guy named, well, Braille.
Louis Braille, that is, a Frenchman
who had a bad accident at the age of three
that left him blind.
Back in those days, there weren't many resources
to help people with blindness, but Louis Braille still
excelled as a student.
At 10 years old, he won a scholarship
to a state of the art school in Paris called the Royal
Institution for Blind Youth.
It was one of the very first schools
in the world for the blind and Louis flourished in his years
there.
He learned through oral lessons and would read books
that the school's founder had customized so the letters were
raised on the page.
This helped him and other students read,
but it could sometimes be hard to tell certain letters apart.
Somewhere along the line, Louis decided
he was going to try and devise a system that would let
people with blindness do both.
He finally got his spark of inspiration
when he learned about a former French army
captain named Charles Barbier who invented
a system called night writing.
Soldiers used it to pass coded messages around
in the cover of darkness without needing
to speak or spark a light.
Messages were written out in a code
of raised dots and dashes that were pressed into the paper.
So he went about adapting Barbier's system for the blind.
In Braille, each letter of the alphabet
is represented by a different pattern
of raised dots, which were easy to tell apart even with just
a fingertip.
Braille's new system was ready to show off.
And in 1824, he did just that.
At just 15 years old, Braille presented his new system
to his peers.
And just five years later, he published the first ever book
on Braille.
The second revision was published eight years later
and included symbols for math and music too.
Louis, who had always been in fairly poor health,
died young at the age of 43.
Braille never got to live to see his namesake
spread across the world.
His home nation of France first recognized the Braille system
two years after his death.
Today, the Braille system is the standard form
of reading and writing used by people with visual impairments
in all corners of the globe.
It's been adapted to different languages and scripts
so that just about any language can be translated into Braille.
Nice.
Who invented football?
People first started playing American football
in the mid 1800s at colleges and universities
in the US and Canada.
The very first official college football game
took place on November 6, 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers.
But the game and its rules looked a lot more like rugby
in those days.
There were no downs, line of scrimmage,
and no forward passing whatsoever.
Over the next few decades, the sport and its rules
continue to slowly evolve.
A man by the name of Walter Camp,
a former collegiate football player at Yale
is considered to be the father of American football
for helping to implement many changes that
turned the game into the sport we recognize today.
Things like the point system, snapping the ball,
having four downs, and even the standard arrangement
of the players on the field were all his idea.
By the 1880s, athletic clubs were becoming extremely popular
all across the country.
Athletic clubs were groups of people that got together
to play different sports as a team, kind
of like an adult little league team.
The more popular these athletic clubs became,
the more competitive the games got.
And over time, competition got fierce
as each club tried to attract the best players.
Some clubs would help start players get jobs or give them
expensive gifts.
But since all players were supposed to be amateurs,
this was frowned upon and considered cheating by many.
And it all came to a head over 100 years
ago on November 12th, 1892 when one team finally
took it one step too far.
AAA and PAC were two athletic clubs from the Pittsburgh area
that were already bitter rivals.
So when their November showdown rolled around that year,
both teams were ready to pull out
all the stops to get the win.
For AAA, that meant taking a truly unprecedented step
of paying a star player from another team to come
play for them in the big game.
This made a man by the name of William Pudge Heffelfinger
the very first verifiable person to ever
be paid to play football.
The two teams debated, argued, and bickered about the move,
but eventually decided to play the game.
AAA won with Heffelfinger scoring the only points.
Nowadays, the NFL is America's most popular pro sports
league by a long shot and continues to grow.
And we can all think a bitter rivalry in Pittsburgh
for getting it all started.