Monday, August 31, 2009

The Holy Koran

The first line of the Holy Koran: "All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds." Opening 1.1.
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Sunday, August 30, 2009

Harley-Davidson

The first Harley-Davidson motorcycles were built in Milwaukee in 1903. Working in a small shed with borrowed tools and some metal, Arthur and Walter Davidson along with Bill Harley built the very first Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The bike featured a three horsepower engine and a unique loop frame. Harley-Davidson incorporated in 1907 and began a fantastic run that continues today.
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Saturday, August 29, 2009

The X Games

The X Games first debuted in 1995. Athletes competed in twenty seven events in nine sports categories including bungee jumping, eco-challenge, in-line skating, skateboarding, sky surfing, sport climbing, street luge, biking and water sports. The games were held over eight days in Rhode Island and Vermont, with 198,000 spectators on hand for the opening event.
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Friday, August 28, 2009

Major League Baseball's first televised game

Major League Baseball's first televised game occurred at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn on August 26, 1939. The double-header between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds was broadcast to about five hundred homes. Dodgers announcer Red Barber did the play by play. Two cameras were used to view the game, one from behind home plate and the other focused on Barber.
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Thursday, August 27, 2009

The first recorded smoking ban

The first recorded smoking ban was issued in 1590 when Pope Urban VII declared a ban on public smoking and tobacco use inside a church. The Nazi party issued the first modern nationwide tobacco ban in 1941. A direct order from Adolph Hitler banned the use of tobacco in every German university, post office, military hospital and Nazi Party office.
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Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The Louvre

The Louvre was established as an art museum in Paris, France, in 1793, making it the first recognized art gallery in the world. The Louvre was built in the late 12th century as a fortress, then becoming a palace for Louis XIV during the 1700s. The nation's art collection was established there after the French Revolution. The Louvre currently has over 35,000 pieces of art.
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Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Chocolate bars

In 1847, Joseph Fry discovered a way to mix melted cacao butter with cocoa powder and sugar to create a molded chocolate bar. Adding to this several years later, Milton S. Hershey installed in his factory a chocolate-making machine he saw on display at the 1893 World's Fair and produced the first chocolate bars. Hershey began selling the first mass produced candy bar, the Hershey Bar, in 1900.
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Monday, August 24, 2009

400 richest Americans

Forbes magazine's 2006 list of the 400 richest Americans consisted exclusively of people worth $1 billion or more. This marked the first time since the famous annual list began being published in 1982 that no millionaires appeared on it. As a group, the top 400 wealthiest Americans were worth over $1 trillion.
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Sunday, August 23, 2009

Karaoke machines

The first Karaoke machine was developed in 1970 by Japanese singer Daisuke Inoue. To satisfy frequent "sing-along" requests for his songs, Inoue made a tape recorder that played a song for a 100-yen coin. Karaoke is a Japanese phrase, "kara" comes from "karappo" meaning empty and "oke" is the abbreviation of "okesutura," or orchestra.
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Saturday, August 22, 2009

Clarence Darrow

"The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children." -- Clarence Darrow.
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Friday, August 21, 2009

The first mass-produced PC

First shipped in 1977, the Apple II computer was the first personal computer to be built in large-scale production. Up until the development of the Apple II, most microcomputers were sold in kits or were hand-built in relatively small quantities. The inexpensive and easy to use Apple II introduced computer users to digital spreadsheets, word processing, and computer graphics.
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The first proms

The first proms were held in the late 1800s at elite colleges of the Northeast. The spring time events were held as a means of instilling social skills and etiquette in students. The dances were strictly chaperoned and were often restricted to only the senior class. The word prom is a shortened form of promenade, meaning a march of the guests at the beginning of a ball or other formal event.
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Thursday, August 20, 2009

The Flintstones

The animated cartoon series The Flintstones was the first successful prime time animated series in the U.S, airing on ABC from 1960 to 1966. The show was a takeoff of the 1950s series The Honeymooners, set in the town of Bedrock in the Stone Age era. The success of the Flintstones spawned other network prime time cartoon series such as The Jetsons, Top Cat, and The Alvin Show.
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Wednesday, August 19, 2009

The first modern mutual fund

The creation of the Massachusetts Investors' Trust in Boston, Massachusetts in 1924 is heralded as the first modern mutual fund. Assets of the fund grew from $50,000 to $392,000 when it went public in 1928. By 1929, there were nearly 750 mutual funds in operation. Today, there are more than 10,000 mutual funds with holdings measured in the trillions of dollars.
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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The Beatles

The first performance of The Beatles took place at the Indra Club in Hamburg, Germany on August 18, 1960. The band members included John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and Stuart Stutcliffe. The group earned £10 playing almost five hours of rhythm and blues and rock and roll cover tunes.
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Monday, August 17, 2009

First year of the twentieth century

Events from the first year of the twentieth century: the world celebrates the start of the new century; President McKinley is assassinated in Buffalo, New York; the Cadillac Motor Company is formed in Detroit; the first Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm; Marconi receives the first trans-Atlantic radio signal; oil is discovered in Texas.
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Sunday, August 16, 2009

Picador Porky

According to the Internet Movie Database, Mel Blanc is credited with having the most movie actor credits to his name. Known for his cartoon voices of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, Mel Blanc has performed in over 700 films and over 100 TV movies and video productions. Blanc's first character was a drunken bull in the 1937 Looney Tunes short Picador Porky.
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Saturday, August 15, 2009

Dance marathons

Dance marathons were first held in the U.S. during the 1920s as competitive events with paying spectators watching professional and amateur dancers. Marathon events garnered radio and newspaper coverage. By the late 1930s, dance marathons had faded from the cultural landscape, as World War II sent former marathoners and their audiences to work and to war.
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Friday, August 14, 2009

Ancient World Wonders

The list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was first compiled by Greek historians around the 200 BC. The first Ancient Wonder is The Great Pyramid of Giza. Built in what today is greater Ciaro, the Pyramid was the tallest structure on Earth for more than 43 centuries. Each pyramid side is oriented with the compass point north, south, east, and west. The maximum error between side lengths is less than 0.1%.
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Thursday, August 13, 2009

Mount Everest

The Seven Natural Wonders of the World is comprised of natural phenomena that were not made or improved upon by humans. The first Natural Wonder of the World is Mount Everest. Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world measuring 29,028 feet or 8,848 meters. It stands in Nepal and borders Tibet. Everest's summit was first reached by a human expedition in 1953.
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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The first IBM PC

The first IBM PC was introduced on August 12, 1981. Priced at $1,565, the PC had a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor, a 160-KB floppy disk drive, and an optional color monitor. The development team at IBM developed the IBM PC in twelve months, at that time, faster than any other hardware product in IBM's history.
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Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Chess

The first game of Chess is believed to have been played around 600 AD in what is now northern India or Afghanistan. By trade and war, the game spread to Persia and Europe. The Europeans modernized the game to represent their social status, thus giving the chess pieces the names we know today. The current rules of Chess have been used for the last 700 years.
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Monday, August 10, 2009

Genesis, 1:1

The first line of the Holy Bible: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Genesis, 1:1
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Sunday, August 9, 2009

Wrigley under lights

The first scheduled baseball game played at night under lights at Wrigley field took place on August 8, 1988. Every game at Wrigley had been played during the day since the first baseball game was played there on April 23, 1914. The Chicago Cubs installed lights after 5,687 consecutive day games to meet baseball's prime time interest from fans and television.
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Saturday, August 8, 2009

President Richard Nixon

President Richard Nixon was the first U.S. President to resign this office. Faced with what seemed almost certain impeachment, Nixon announced on August 8, 1974, that he would resign the next day. The resignation stemmed from an attempted cover up of a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee during the 1972 presidential campaign.
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Friday, August 7, 2009

Hustler's Convention

The Last Poets 1973 album "Hustler's Convention" is considered by many to be the first original inspiration of Rap music. A mix of funk, rhythm, DJing, and break-dancing evolved into Rap during the late 1970s, and Hip-Hop in the 1980s. The first Hip-Hop record is considered to be Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" released in 1979.
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Thursday, August 6, 2009

The first baseball cards

The first baseball cards were designed as advertising trade cards used like brochures. A company named Peck and Snyder printed baseball cards in the late 1860s and used them as advertisements for their products. Baseball cards were distributed nationwide starting in the mid-1880s. The golden age of baseball cards is considered to be from 1909 to 1915.
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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Rhazes

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi, better known as Rhazes, was a leading figure in the field of medicine during the tenth century. He wrote the first-known description of small pox and was the first to describe and define allergies, particularly hay fever. He was also credited with being the first to use animal gut for sutures and plaster to construct casts.
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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Endangered Species

The 1966 Endangered Species Preservation Act was the first U.S. law designed to protect endangered species. The act was inspired by the plight of the Whooping Crane, Grizzly Bear, American Alligator, and many other endangered species. The law created a list of endangered domestic fish and wildlife and allowed the federal government to spend up to $15 million per year to buy habitat for listed species
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Monday, August 3, 2009

Frisbees

The first Frisbee was crafted from plastic by Walter Frederick Morrison and Warren Franscioni in San Luis Obispo, California in 1947. Their plastic disc was called the Flyin' Saucer and later renamed the Pluto Platter. After ten-years of hawking their new toy, a partnership was formed in 1958 with Wham-O, which renamed the Pluto Platter to Frisbee.
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Sunday, August 2, 2009

Cable cars

On August 1, 1873, a crowd gathered at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets in San Francisco at five o'clock in the morning to board the first run of a cable car system developed by Andrew Smith Hallidie. After seeing many horses succumb to the steep slopes of the city, Hallidie devised a mechanism by which cars were drawn by metal cable running in a slot between the rails.
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Saturday, August 1, 2009

Peace Corps

The first Peace Corps units were sent abroad in 1961, following the agency's formation by President Kennedy in 1960. The group's purpose is to assist other countries in their development efforts by providing skilled workers in the fields of education, agriculture, health, trade, technology, and community development. Nearly 200,000 people have served in the Corps since its formation.
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