Firsts by Wilson Casey Read Free Book Online Page B

powerhouse kept the cable in continuous motion.

Caesar Salad
    The first Caesar salad was the 1924 creation of Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini, who had a small hotel in Tijuana, Mexico, not far from the California border. In the days of Prohibition, the Hollywood crowd and San Diego socialites would drive over the border to Tijuana to party, and they often wound up at Hotel Caesars for a meal before returning home. On July 4, 1924, an abundance of patrons arrived at Caesar’s Hotel, sending the kitchen into a panic. There weren’t enough fresh vegetables to go around, so Cardini concocted a salad he thought they’d really go for, and he would make it in public, tableside. Using basic ingredients found in every Italian kitchen, he used romaine lettuce, coddled eggs, garlic-flavored olive oil, Parmesan cheese, salt, pepper, and croutons flavored with Worcestershire sauce. Needless to say, it was a hit.

Caesarean Operation
    Around 1500, the first woman, the wife of a pig gelding farmer, Jacob Nufer, in Sigershauffen, Switzerland, is reported to have survived through a caesarean operation of baby delivery, or C-section. Nufer was so distraught by his wife’s prolonged labor that he felt no choice but to cut her open to somehow prevent his wife and baby from dying in childbirth. Utilizing his pig-butchering knowledge, Nufer successfully “operated” on his wife and delivered a healthy child who purportedly lived to the age of 77. Since ancient Roman times, the procedure had been performed only on the deceased or on women with little hope of surviving labor.

Calculator
    In 1642, Blaise Pascal, a noted French mathematician, built the first mechanical adding machine or calculator. It was called the Pascaline and was based on a design described by Hero of Alexandria in the first century C.E. to figure a carriage’s traveling distance. The metal device was about 14 inches long, 13 inches wide, and 3 inches high, about the size of a large shoe box. There were eight windows on its top, and through them could be seen a small drum with digits. In front of the windows, eight setting mechanisms enabled the user to enter numbers to compute. Although crude and tedious, the Pascaline could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. The basic principle of this first calculator is still used today in water meters and odometers.

Calendar
    Many historians believe the first calendar was inscribed on a 30,000+- year-old bone known as the Blanchard Plaque discovered in Abri Blanchard, Dordogne, France, in 1879. Marks on the bone made by Paleolithic people represented sequential phases of the moon and were engraved based on observations over 9 weeks. The inscriptions on the plaque, small dots, are the oldest known use of numbers by humans.

Camera to Use Film Rolls
    In June 1888, George Eastman of Rochester, New York, announced the Kodak No. 1, the world’s first box camera to use roll film. Retailing for $25, it weighed 22 ounces and could take 100 (65mm) pictures. The shutter was set by pulling a string, and a V shape on top of the camera provided a sightline. After each exposure, the user manually turned a key on top of the camera to wind the film to the next frame. To develop the film, the user sent the entire camera back to the Kodak company. Kodak processed the film, reloaded the camera, and returned it to the user for a cost of $10.

Can Opener
    In 1858, Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut, patented the first can opener, although some give the credit to Briton Robert Yeates’s design. Warner’s can opener was a crude gadget shaped like a bayonet and a sickle. The user jabbed the pointed bayonet part into the can and pushed it in up to a small metal guard that kept it from going in too much. At the same time, the sickle piece was forced into the can. The user had to saw up and down along the top edge of the can to open it. This first can opener was really hazardous to use but it became popular for grocers to have one in their stores to