The earliest ballet to be inspired by a video game series was Dragon Quest. Composed by Koichi Sugiyama and choreographed by ballet master Minoru Suzuki, it was originally written in 1995 and premiered in Tokyo, Japan, in 1996. It has been performed several times since: in 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2002.
Hungarian journalist Ladislo Biro created the first ball-point pen with his brother George in 1938. Biro took his inspiration from watching newspaper ink dry quickly, leaving the paper smudge-free. Since this thicker ink would not flow from a conventional pen nib, he revolutionised pen design with the idea of a ball-point. The first Biro went on sale in 1944 and cost the equivalent of £60 today. The Royal Air Force was one of the first organisations to use the Biro as they needed a pen,
Continue reading →
Ivan André Trifonov (Austria) flew a one man Thunder and Colt Cloudhopper balloon 1 km (0.6 miles) over the geographic North Pole at 18h30 GMT on 20 April 1996.
Ole Einar Bjørndalen (Norway) is the first – and, to date, only – biathlete to win the sprint, pursuit, individual and relay events in a single Winter Games, when he competed in the 2002 Salt Lake City Games in Utah, USA. He was denied the big four in the 2005 biathlon World Cup when he finished unplaced in the individual 20 km race.
The earliest international beauty contest was staged by P. T. Barnum (with the public to be the judges) in the USA in June 1855.
J.K. Rowling (UK) is one of only five self-made female billionaires, and the first billion-dollar author. The seven Harry Potter books have sold a total of 400 million copies around the world and are published in 55 languages, including Latin and Ancient Greek. According to Forbes, Rowling has grossed over $1 billion (£627 million) for her novels and from related earnings.
The earliest machine propelled by cranks and pedals with connecting rods was built in 1839-40 by Kirkpatrick Macmillan (1810-78) of Dumfries, Scotland. A copy of the machine is now in the Science Museum, London, England. Italian artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is often credited with designing the first ‘bicycle’, having drawn a machine propelled with cranks and pedals in the 1490s. Macmillan was the first person known to have constructed such a machine, but this was not followed up. Four-wheeled bicycles were produced
Continue reading →
The first bible published in North America was the so-called “Eliot Bible” which was printed in 1663 at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But it was not a version of the King’s Speech…or King’s English–the King James Bible. Rather, it was written in the Algonquin Indian language. Harvard’s charter had called for educating Indians, and the Puritan founders of the school hoped that a bible translated into the indigenous language would serve to convert the native peoples to Christianity. An English-language bible was not printed
Continue reading →
The world’s first fully bioluminescent, transgenic pigs were born in 2005, created by a scientific team from Taiwan University’s Department of Animal Science and Technology. They added DNA from bioluminescent jellyfish to approximately 265 pig embryos, which were in turn implanted into eight different sows. Four of these sows duly became pregnant, and three male bioluminescent piglets were born. Even in daylight they have a greenish tinge, which becomes a torch-like glow if blue light is shone on them in the dark, and not only
Continue reading →
The first bioluminescent mammals were a series of glowing mice created in 1995 by Stanford University researcher Christopher Contag and co-workers, extracting genes responsible for bioluminescence from various glowing bacteria and inserting them into Salmonella bacteria, which causes severe food poisoning. These now-glowing Salmonella bacteria, having adopted the bioluminescence genes as their own and reproducing with these genes retained from generation to generation, were then fed to some mice, and Contag and his team were able to watch directly how the Salmonella infection took hold
Continue reading →