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.

Since 1993, Scottish hotel owner Campbell Aird, who had his right arm amputated in 1982 after doctors diagnosed muscular cancer, has been trying out a new  bionic arm created by a team of five bio-engineers at the Margaret Rose Hospital, Edinburgh, UK.   Two other motorised artificial arms have been developed in America, but these were essentially only powered elbows.

Erik Weihenmayer (Hong Kong) was born with retinoschisis, an eye condition that left him totally blind by the age of 13. Despite this, on 25 May 2001, he reached the summit of Mount Everest, the first – and so far only – blind man ever to have done so. Erik’s other notable feats include his 2002 completion of the Seven Summits – climbing the highest peak on each of the seven continents of the world. Erik is also an accomplished rock climber, skier and paraglider.

The first advertising blimp was the ‘Suchard’ Airship, a human-driven airship financed by the Swiss chocolatiers, Suchard, and which in 1912-13, was built to fly the Atlantic east to west from the Canary Islands to the USA. Whilst the crossing failed due to financial and operating difficulties, it was the first time a commercial airship was sponsored for advertising purposes.

The earliest fossil bird is known from two partial skeletons found in Texas, USA in rocks dating from 220 million years ago. Named Protoavis texensis in 1991, this pheasant-sized creature has caused much controversy by pushing the age of birds back many millions of years from the previous record – that of the more familiar Archaeopteryx lithographica found in Jurassic sediments in Germany. It is still unclear whether Protoavis will be widely accepted as a true bird, making Archaeopteryx, the 153-million-year-old crow-sized flier, the earliest Continue reading →

Sir Paul McCartney and Wings – with the help of producer Sir George Martin (all UK) – created perhaps the best ever Bond theme song with “Live and Let Die”, the first to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song (1973), It charted at no.2 in the USA and no.7 in the UK, and lost the Oscar to “The Way We Were” from the movie of the same name. To date, no Bond music has won an Oscar.

The earliest brain-training video game was Mind Quiz. Ubisoft opted voluntarily to have their brain development gameremoved from the shelves of UK games stores when it was revealed that players scoring poorly were categorised as “super spastic”. The game was developed in Japan, where the word was overlooked during quality assurance testing.

Although the practice of throwing players up against powerful boss enemies soon became an FPS cliché, Wolfenstein 3D was the first title in the genre to make such battles an integral part of progress. Infamously, the game’s final boss was Adolf Hitler himself, sporting a mechanical suit of armour and twin Gatling guns! Featured in Guinness World Records Gamer”s Edition 2010

The first woman to be elected to the British House of Commons was Mme Constance Georgine Markievicz (n‚e Gore Booth). She was elected as member (Sinn Fein) for St Patrick’s Dublin on 28 December 1918 but did not take her seat. The first woman to take her seat was the Viscountess Astor (1879-1964) (n‚e Nancy Witcher Langhorne at Danville, Virginia, USA; formerly Mrs Robert Gould Shaw), who was elected Unionist member for the Sutton division of Plymouth, Devon on 28 November 1919 and took her Continue reading →

The first municipal motor omnibus service in the world was inaugurated on 12 April 1903 and ran between Eastbourne railway station and Meads, East Sussex, UK.