Hey Thoughty2 here.
As you will see in many a comments section, being first is very important to some people.
We’re a competitive race us humans and there’s a never ending battle to be number one on
the list, whether it’s for lightning fast speeds, vast sums of money, or eating a frankly
worrying volume of food in a short time.
And once your name is in the history books, it’s there for good.
But that’s no guarantee that the general population will have any idea who the hell
you are.
Sure, we know the first man on the moon, the first people to fly.
But other firsts become lost to the darkest corners of Wikipedia.
So today we’re looking at some little known but astonishingly interesting firsts from
history.
Let’s start on a nice depressing war.
When all the dust has settled, the historians wander in, stretching their leather elbow
patches, and try to work out what on Earth happened.
So, in a war involving so many millions of deaths, does any one individual casualty have
more importance than the others?
Well, maybe.
Franciszek Honiok could be described as the first casualty of WW2 but he is much more
important than that.
Germany and Poland had an ongoing dispute over their border and the Nazis, not renowned
for their patience, decided to take matters into their own hands.
Honiok was an unmarried German farmer, with Polish sympathies.
On 30th August 1939, in the village of Polomia, he was arrested by the SS.
The next day, this SS squad dressed as Polish saboteurs and stormed a radio station in the
city of Gliwice and fired shots in the air.
One German officer grabbed the microphone and shouted in Polish “Attention!
This is Gliwice.
The broadcasting station is in Polish hands”.
They then left Honiok’s body, who they had already killed by injection, and filled him
with bullet holes.
They also added the bodies of other dead Germans, dressed as Polish soldiers, which they had
brought from a local concentration camp.
These bodies were then presented as evidence that the Polish were attacking and the messaged
that was screamed into the microphone was broadcast across the country.
Honiok’s death was used to justify the start of the war.
Nazi propaganda at its best.
The following morning, on 1st September 1939, Hitler declared war on Poland.
I mean, it’s probably been said before, but the Nazis really were a bunch of bastards.
Although there are still some inequalities in the world today, at least there has been
some improvement in the number of women in powerful positions and we now have women leading
Britain and Germany and potentially America.
But historically, we have not really let women up at the top table, possibly because we were
embarrassed that we had got it so messy and now we’d have to bother to put our pants
on.
There have been famous queens such as Cleopatra, Catherine the Great and Victoria but when
it came to proper non-royal leaders, it took quite some time for one to appear.
Khertek Anchimaa-Toka was the first female leader of the modern world.
In 1940, she was made Chair of the Presidium of Little Khural, meaning she was the head
of the Tuvan People’s Republic.
Tuva is now part of Russia but it was a member of the Soviet Union.
When Anchimaa-Toka, was born, Tuva was just beginning to form, having previously been
part of the Chinese empire.
The Bolsheviks helped set up the Tuvan People’s Republic after the Russian revolution of 1917.
The new state helped women to read and write, since most were illiterate and Anchimaa-Toka
was one of the first to learn the new Tuvan alphabet.
She then worked to help others gain an education and eventually won a place in a Moscow university,
where she adopted Stalinist ideology, which was pretty important since if you weren’t
a member of the Stalin fan club, things like your dinner, family and life often got misplaced
somehow.
Of course, it’s not just politics where women have been under-represented, it’s
in the arts too.
In 2009, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director in 80 years of
the Oscar awards.
Hurt Locker was the gritty story of a bomb disposal team in Iraq but, despite its brilliance,
it only took $12 million at the box office.
Ironically, it beat Avatar in the Oscar race, directed by Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron,
which is the highest grossing film of all time.
Bigelow had a previous box office smash with Point Break, where she tried numerous times
to kill off Keanu Reeves by throwing him out of planes and sending him off into giant waves
but unfortunately she was unsuccessful and had to allow him continue to act.
The film is such a cult classic that there is now a touring stage show called Point Break
Live.
Since they didn’t have a spare broomstick to act Keanu’s part, they fill it every
night with a different member of the audience.
Julia Phillips was actually the first woman to win an Oscar for best film, when she was
a producer on the classic conman tale The Sting.
Other notable Oscar firsts are; Hattie McDaniel, the first black Oscar winner as supporting
actress in Gone With The Wind and, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio who probably deserves a
mention as the most historically unsuccessful nominee to finally win an Oscar, it’s a
good job he did before he eventually snapped and went all “Man-vs-Bear” on the audience.
We can’t talk about firsts without talking about sport, and where better to look than
the Olympics.
The modern Olympics was first held in Athens and American James Connolly won the very first
gold medal for the triple jump.
The 100m has often been the headline act and Jim Hines holds the official record as first
man to run it in under ten seconds, with 9.95 in the 1968 final.
There had been other sub ten times before, with American Bob Hayes being the first to
ever make it on paper, but a rule change about timing and wind speeds in 1977 meant that
these are no longer recognized.
Physicists think it’s unlikely the world record will ever go much below 9.4 seconds
and, surprisingly, the best hope is actually the Paralympics, since the blades, made famous
by Oscar Pistorius, are lighter than a leg and can increase the time connected with the
ground and so apply more force.
And finally, let’s talk about love.
On 1st April 2001, Helene Faasen and Anne-Marie thus became the first gay couple to get married
in the modern era, along with three other pairs of gay men.
The wedding took place in Amsterdam and since then we have seen about 20 countries follow
suit by making it legal.
The thing is, gay marriage is not a new thing at all.
No one batted an eyelid when Roman Emperor Nero completed a love triangle by marrying
a freedman called Pythagoras and later a young boy called Sporus, presumably chosen for his
small size so the sum of him and Nero squared was equal to Pythagoras squared.
There’s also Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz, two men married in a Galician church in 1061.
And let’s not forget the Siwa Oasis in Egypt which used to have its own form of same-sex
marriage.
So, with so many of the firsts already ticked off the list, you’re going to have to get
creative if you want to join the annals of the greats.
Maybe try inventing your own sport or developing your own language.
Or, if you want to be a real maverick, start preparing to be the first person to buy the
revolutionary iPhone 8, which will feature no headphone jack and no screen.
You’ll be paying more for less, sure people will think you’re crazy, but at least you’ll
be first.
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