It’s hard to get excited about a landline call when you’re likely reading this article on your smartphone—a device that people use to do pretty much everything but make phone calls. Technophiles can celebrate April 3, 1973, as their holiday. On this date, Motorola employee Martin Cooper made the first cell phone call, standing outside in Manhattan, to a colleague in New Jersey. His immortal first words? “I’m ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end?” … and nearly 50 years later we’re still yelling, “Can you hear me now?!”
The first food ever microwaved on purpose was… exactly what you’d imagine it would be: Popcorn! On October 8, 1945, Raytheon patented the first microwave cooking oven. They revealed that their engineer Percy Spencer had first discovered the heating powers of microwaves when he was working with them in the lab and accidentally melted a candy bar in his pocket. He then tested it out officially on popcorn, which was a success, and an egg, which exploded in his face.
On October 5, 1974, Dave Kunst walked back into Waseca, Minnesota, from the west, after having walked out of it from the east nearly four months earlier. He did not get lost on the way to the gas station to get a beer. Instead, he became the first verified person to walk all the way around the earth on foot.
People have been chuckling along to laugh tracks and the crazy antics of actors on television pretty much as long as there have been televisions. The first TV sitcom, Pinwright’s Progress, debuted on November 29, 1946, on the BBC and chronicled the adventures of the smallest store in the world. The first episode was about proprietor J. Pinwright, his pretty daughter, and his arch nemesis, along with his “helpful” staff who only made things worse. We would totally watch that.
a day and age where pedestrians getting hit by cars has unfortunately become so routine it hardly even makes the news anymore, it can be easy to forget that there had to have been a first person to be killed by those new-fangled mechanical horses. And that person was Bridget Driscoll when she was struck down by a demonstration car on August 17, 1896. The car was traveling at four miles per hour which makes it even harder to understand how the tragedy happened. The coroner said he hoped “such a thing would never happen again.”