Firsts by Wilson Casey Read Free Book Online Page A

and not too far—nor too close—to the city. King Bimbisara was the Buddha’s first Royal Patron, and it’s said that as the king poured donation water for the facility, the earth quaked as if the main roots of Buddha’s teachings had rooted into the ground. Even though the Buddha’s new residence was known as Veluvanarama ( arama is used to denote a monastery), there were no permanent buildings. The Buddha and his monks resided under the shelter of the trees for 6 years during the rainy season before moving elsewhere.

Bungee Jump
    Around 1000 C.E., the first bungee jump was performed on Pentecost Island in the Pacific Archipelago of Vanuatu. A man called Tamalie in the village Bunlap had a quarrel with his wife. She ran away, climbed a tall Banyan tree, and wrapped her ankles with liana vines. Tamalie followed her up the tree. The woman jumped and survived because of the vines tied to her ankles. The man also jumped, not knowing what his wife had done. He died, and the men of Bunlap were very impressed by his performance. Thereafter, the jump transformed into an ongoing death-defying religious ritual called naghol, or “land diving,” that inspired modern-day bungee jumping.

Burger Chain
    In 1921, White Castle became the United States’ first hamburger chain when Billy Ingram, a real estate businessman, and Walter Anderson, the man who first flattened hamburger into a patty with a spatula and grilled it on a bed of shredded onions, formed a partnership. With $700 borrowed money, the first White Castle opened in Wichita, Kansas, offering hamburgers at 5¢ apiece. The hamburger was considered low-class food before White Castle changed the public’s mind through targeted ad campaigns. One PR initiative was printed coupons offering 5 White Castles (what the burgers were called) for 10¢. It also helped that the customers could watch the burgers being made. Ingram and Anderson came up with the 5-hole concept of burger-making to ensure the burgers were thoroughly cooked. In 1961, White Castle was the first chain to sell a billion hamburgers. White Castle’s other firsts included the industrial-strength spatula, the mass-produced paper hat, and a marketing slogan for fast food; White Castle’s was “Buy ’em by the sack.” The founders of White Castle created a market demand for burgers and started many of the concepts still used in the fast-food industry today.

Button
    Around 3500 B.C.E., the first buttons were used more as ornaments than as fastening devices. The earliest known buttons were found at Mohenjo-daro in India’s Indus Valley. They were made of a curved shell and worn as a class status symbol. During that time, men used straps and pins to fasten their crude clothing while the first buttons just hung around, waiting for the next big clothing innovation. Later, around 700 B.C.E., the ancient Greeks and Etruscans used buttons made of wood, bone, or horn that fastened clothing via loops, not buttonholes. Fully functional buttons paired with buttonholes for fastening did not appear until the thirteenth century in Germany.

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Cable Car
    On March 23, 1858, Eleazer S. Gardner of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, invented the first cable car and was granted patent #19736 for his “improvements in tracks for city railways.” His cable streetcar was to run on an endless cable loop centrally housed in an underground tunnel with a series of pulleys inside. Gardner’s conceptualization was not immediately put into practical use for transporting people. It was a few years later, in 1873, that Andrew Hallidie put his own cable car system into service on Clay Street in San Francisco, California. Both gentlemen’s cable cars were based on the concept of placing a continuously moving wire rope in a conduit underneath a slot between the rails, all beneath the surface of the street. A gripping attachment connected to the cable car above could engage or disengage the cable to move the car. An engine in a centrally located