The earliest internal combustion-engined motorized bicycle was a wooden-framed machine built at Bad Cannstatt, Germany between October-November 1885 by Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) and first ridden by Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929). It had a top speed of 19 km/h (12 mph) and developed 0.37 kW (0.5 hp) from its single-cylinder 264cc four-stroke engine at 700 rpm. Known as the `Einspur’, it was lost in a fire in 1903.
The first run and gun game to use characters from a movie was Rambo: First Blood Part II on the SEGA Master System. The game was originally released in Japan under the title Ashura and had nothing to do with Sylvester Stallone’s action movie. When SEGA released the title in America, it licensed the movie brand and swapped the Asian lead character for a Stallone sprite. In Europe, the game was released in its original form as Secret Command,because a Rambo game was already being
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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (USA, 1937) was the first movie with an official soundtrack.
Often hailed as the ‘founding fathers of modern film’, the Lumiere Brothers, Louis and Auguste, can take credit for the first commercial exhibition of a projected motion picture to a paying public in 1895, in the world’s first movie theatre – the Salon Indien, at the Grand Cafe on Paris’ Boulevard des Capucines. The 20-minute program included ten short films with twenty showings a day.
MP3 is short for MPEG audio layer-3 and is a widely-used digital music file type. It is audio-only and is a direct descendent of the MPEG-1, which is low-bandwidth video compression, commonly used over the internet. The development of MP3 began in 1987 at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen in Germany, and in 1992 it was recognised as the international standard by the International Standards Organisation, as part of the MPEG-1 standard.
Steven Spielberg (USA) and Electronic Arts signed a long-term deal in October 2005 to jointly create three new originalvideo-game franchises. Boom Blox is the first of these. There are currently no details on the other two planned franchises. Although EA’s Boom Blox wascreated in collaboration with Academy Award winner Steven Spielberg, it wasn’t the esteemed film-maker’s first foray into game development. That honour falls to The Dig, released by LucasArts in 1995, which was based on an original story idea by Spielberg and credits him
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On 23 November 2006, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, a retired member of the Russian security services (FSB), died from radiation poisoning in London, UK, becoming the first known victim of lethal Polonium 210-induced acute radiation syndrome. Despite investigations the murder case remains unresolved.
In 1972, Rick Rashid and Gene Ball wrote the first networked multiplayer space battle game called Alto Trek, based on Star Trek.
The first national pinball championship was the “Big Whiffle Tournament” - whiffle being considered the first pinball machine - was held between 24 and 26 May 1935 in the Futuristic Ballroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, and attracted hundreds of pinball players from all across the USA. It featured 200 whiffle pinball tables and promised $1,000 (£520) in prizes (including a “fine bedroom suite”). The event was conducted as a charity fundraiser for the Badger State Advancement Association of the Blind, and certain whiffles were adapted
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The shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald (USA) the man accused of killing US President John F. Kennedy by Jack Ruby (USA) on 24 November 1963 was broadcast live on national television and is the first known human killing seen live on TV.