As you will see, being first is very important to some people.
We’re a competitive race us humans
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and there’s a never ending battle to be number one on the list, whether it’s for lightning fast speeds,
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fast sums of money,
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or eating a frankly
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worrying volume of food in a short time. And once your name is in the history books, it’s there for good. But that’s no guarantee that the general population will have any idea who the hell you are.
Sure, we know the first man on the moon,
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The first people to fly.
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But other firsts become lost to the darkest corners of Wikipedia.
Let’s start on a nice depressing war. When all the dust has settled, the historians wander in, stretching their leather elbow patches, and try to work out what on Earth Happened.
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So, in a war involving so many millions of deaths, does any one individual casualty have more importance than the others?
Well, maybe. Franciszek Honiok
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could be described as the first casualty of World War 2 but he is much more important than that. Germany and Poland had an ongoing dispute over their border and the Nazis, not renowned for their patience, decided to take matters into their own hands. Honiok was an unmarried German farmer, with Polish sympathies. On 30th August 1939, in the village of Polomia, he was arrested by the SS. The next day, this SS squad dressed as Polish saboteurs and stormed a radio station in the city of Gliwice and fired shots in the air.
One German officer grabbed the microphone and shouted in Polish “Attention! This is Gliwice. The broadcasting station is in Polish hands”. They then left Honiok’s body, who they had already killed by injection, and filled him with bullet holes. They also added the bodies of other dead Germans, dressed as Polish soldiers, which they had brought from a local concentration camp. These bodies were then presented as evidence that the Polish were attacking and the messaged that was screamed into the microphone was broadcast across the country. Honiok’s death was used to justify the start of the war.
Nazi propaganda at its best. The following morning, on 1st September 1939, Hitler declared war on Poland.
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I mean, it’s probably been said before, but the Nazis really were a bunch of bastards.
Although there are still some inequalities in the world today, at least there has been some improvement in the number of women in powerful positions and we now have women leading Britain
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and Germany
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and potentially America.
But historically, we have not really let women up at the top table, possibly because we were embarrassed that we had got it so messy and now we’d have to bother to put our pants on. There have been famous queens such as Cleopatra,
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Catherine the Great
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and Victoria
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but when it came to proper non-royal leaders, it took quite some time for one to appear.
Khertek Anchimaa-Toka
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was the first female leader of the modern world. In 1940, she was made Chair of the Presidium of Little Khural, meaning she was the head of the Tuvan People’s Republic. Tuva is now part of Russia but it was a member of the Soviet Union. When Anchimaa-Toka, was born, Tuva was just beginning to form, having previously been part of the Chinese empire.
The Bolsheviks helped set up the Tuvan People’s Republic after the Russian revolution of 1917. The new state helped women to read and write, since most were illiterate and Anchimaa-Toka was one of the first to learn the new Tuvan alphabet. She then worked to help others gain an education and eventually won a place in a Moscow university, where she adopted Stalinist ideology, which was pretty important since if you weren’t a member of the Stalin fan club, things like your dinner, family and life often got misplaced Somehow.
Of course, it’s not just politics where women have been under-represented, it’s in the arts too. In 2009, Kathryn Bigelow
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became the first woman to win Best Director in 80 years of the Oscar awards. Hurt Locker
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was the gritty story of a bomb disposal team in Iraq but, despite its brilliance, it only took $12 million at the box office. Ironically, it beat Avatar in the Oscar race, directed by Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron, which is the highest grossing film of all time. Bigelow had a previous box office smash with Point Break,
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where she tried numerous times to kill off Keanu Reeves by throwing him out of planes and sending him off into giant waves but unfortunately she was unsuccessful and had to allow him continue to act. The film is such a cult classic that there is now a touring stage show called Point Break Live. Since they didn’t have a spare broomstick to act Keanu’s part, they fill it every night with a different member of the audience.
Julia Phillips
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was actually the first woman to win an Oscar for best film, when she was a producer on the classic conman tale The Sting.
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Other notable Oscar firsts are; Hattie McDaniel,
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actress in Gone With The Wind
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and, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio
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who probably deserves a mention as the most historically unsuccessful nominee to finally win an Oscar, it’s a good job he did before he eventually snapped and went all “Man-vs-Bear” on the audience.
We can’t talk about firsts without talking about sport, and where better to look than the Olympics.
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The modern Olympics was first held in Athens and American James Connolly
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won the very first gold medal for the triple jump.
The 100m has often been the headline act and Jim Hines
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holds the official record as first man to run it in under ten seconds, with 9.95 in the 1968 final.
There had been other sub ten times before, with American Bob Hayes
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being the first to ever make it on paper, but a rule change about timing and wind speeds in 1977 meant that these are no longer recognized.
Physicists think it’s unlikely the world record will ever go much below 9.4 seconds and, surprisingly, the best hope is actually the Paralympics, since the blades, made famous by Oscar Pistorius,
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are lighter than a leg and can increase the time connected with the ground and so apply more force.
Let’s talk about love. On 1st April 2001, Helene Faasen and Anne-Marie
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thus became the first gay couple to get married in the modern era. The wedding took place in Amsterdam and since then we have seen about 20 countries follow suit by making it legal. The thing is, gay marriage is not a new thing at all. No one batted an eyelid when Roman Emperor Nero completed a love triangle by marrying a freedman called Pythagoras and later a young boy called Sporus,
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presumably chosen for his small size so the sum of him and Nero squared was equal to Pythagoras squared.
There’s also Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz, two men married in a Galician church in 1061. And let’s not forget the Siwa Oasis in Egypt
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which used to have its own form of same-sex Marriage.
And finally, Steemit was the first social network where authors who get upvoted can receive a monetary reward in a cryptocurrency named Steem
So, with so many of the firsts already ticked off the list, you’re going to have to get creative if you want to join the annals of the greats. Maybe try inventing your own sport or developing your own language.
Thanks for the reading