List of firsts This is a list of the first man/woman/animal/object etc. , to do something or the first occurrence of an event . Government Leaders First Emperor of Ancient China : Qin Shi Huang ( ca. 221 BC ) First Emperor of Ancient Rome : Augustus ( ca. 27 BC ) First Bishop of Rome to cond emn heresy : Anicetus , by forbidding Montanism , also actively opposed the Gnostics and Marcionism First Bishop of Rome to be called `` Pope `` : Siricius First Christian Monarch of Sweden : Olof Skötkonung ( 995 ) First President of the United States : George Washington . ( 1789 ) First US President to reside in the White House : John Adams ( 1797 ) First President of Chile : Manuel Blanco Encalada . ( 1826 ) First female President of Chile : Michelle Bachelet ( 2006 ) First Prime Minister of Sweden : Louis De Geer ( 1876 ) First Canadian -born Governor General of Canada : Vincent Massey ( 1952 ) First French-Canadian Governor General of Canada : Georges Vanier First female Governor General of Canada : Jeanne Sauvé First Prime Minister of Canada : Sir John A. Macdonald ( 1867 ) First French-Canadian Prime Minister of Canada ( after Confederation ) : Wilfrid Laurier First female Prime Minister of Canada : Kim Campbell First elected female premier : Sirimavo Bandaranaike , Prime Minister of Sri Lanka . ( 1960 ) First female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom : Margaret Thatcher . ( 1979 ) First African-American elected governor of a U.S. state : Douglas Wilder of Virginia ( 1989 ) First President of Slovenia : Milan Kučan . ( 1990 ) First black President of South Africa : Nelson Mandela . ( 1994 ) First Prime Minister of Australia : Edmund Barton 1901 World 's first female President : Isabel Peron World 's first female Prime Minister : Golda Meir of Israel First African elected female head of state : Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as President of Liberia ( 16 January , 2006 ) First democratically elected female head of state : Vigdís Finnbogadóttir , President of Iceland First Prime Minister of India : Jawaharlal Nehru . ( 1947 ) Laws and Constitution First law written in cuneiform - by Urukagina 2350 BC First written Constitution -- the oldest modern , national , codified constitution in the world First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America Crime and Punishment Crime is defined by a ruling authority through laws and constitution , and penalized thereby . One anthropologist opines that punishment as such is a crime in itself , committed by the state . First victim of the punishment of hanging , drawing and quartering : Dafydd ap Gruffydd . October 3 , 1283 First person to be executed by the guillotine : Nicolas J. Pelletier , highwayman . April 25 , 1792 First instance of a murder captured live on television  : Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald . November 24 , 1963 . ( See pic ) . Travel and Exploration First people to reach the South Pole : Roald Amundsen and his party - Olav Bjaaland , Helmer Hanssen , Sverre Hassel , and Oscar Wisting . December 14 , 1911 First ( and only , as of 2005 ) people to reach the deepest point on the surface of the earth , the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench , Pacific Ocean : Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh on the Bathyscaphe Trieste . January 23 , 1960 First people to scale K2 , the world 's second-highest peak : Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni of the party led by Ardito Desio and Mario Puchoz . July 29 , 1954 First person to die in a crash of a powered airplane : Thomas Selfridge . September 17 , 1908 Geographic North Pole First ( disputed ) expedition to the geographic North Pole : Robert Edwin Peary and his employee Matthew Henson and four Inuit men Ootah , Seegloo , Egingway , and Ooqueah . April 9 , 1909 First people to sight it : Roald Amundsen and his sponsor Lincoln Ellsworth from an aircraft piloted by Umberto Nobile , between 11 May and 13 May , 1926 First people to reach it : Lt. Col. Joseph O. Fletcher and Lt. William P. Benedict landed their plane . May 3 , 1952 First naval vessel to reach it : the USS Skate ( SSN-578 ) . March 17 , 1959 First to reach the North Pole by surface travel : team led by Sir Wally Herbert . 1968-69 First ( confirmed ) surface conquest : Ralph Plaisted . April 19 , 1968 First reigning monarch to reach it : Albert II , Prince of Monaco . Easter Sunday , 16 April , 2006 Mount Everest First recorded deaths on Mount Everest : 7 Sherpas die in avalanche in 1922 First successful summit ( via the South-East Ridge Route ) Tenzing Norgay & Sir Edmund Hillary 29 May 1953 First successful summit via the North Ridge by a Chinese team on 25 May 1960 First American to reach summit James Whittaker in 1963 First ascent of the West Ridge on 22 May 1963 Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein . Also the first traverse of the South East Ridge First person to summit Everest twice : Nawang Gombu Sherpa ( 20 May 1965 ) First woman to summit is Junko Tabei of Japan ( 16 May 1975 ) via the South-East Ridge First woman to summit from the North ( Tibetan ) side is a Tibetan woman named Phantog First summit from the South West face on 24 September 1975 are Dougal Haston and Doug Scott First Ascent without bottled oxygen is by Peter Habeler ( Austria ) and Reinhold Messner ( Italy ) ( 8 May 1978 ) First European woman and the third woman to summit Everest : Wanda Rutkiewicz First woman to die on Everest : Hannelore Schmatz , after becoming the 4th woman to summit Everest First Winter ascent is by Krzysztof Wielicki of Poland ( 17 February 1980 ) First Indian woman to reach the summit was Bachendri Pal ( 23 May 1984 ) First woman to climb without oxygen was Lydia Bradey of New Zealand ( 14 November 1988 ) First true ski descent by Davo Karničar of Slovenia ( 7 October 2000 ) First snowboard descent by Marco Siffredi First blind person to Summit Everest is Erik Weihenmayer ( 2000 ) Beyond the Earth See also : Spaceflight records First artificial satellite launched into orbit : Sputnik 1 . ( 1957 ) First animal in space : fruit flies , 1946 First animal to orbit Earth : Laika . ( 1957 ) First man in space : Yuri Gagarin . ( 1961 ) First woman in space : Valentina Tereshkova . ( 1963 ) First spacewalk : Aleksei Leonov . ( 1965 ) First human to walk on the Moon : Neil Armstrong ( see Apollo 11 ) . ( 1969 ) First woman to perform a space walk : Svetlana Savitskaya . ( 1984 ) First manned private spaceflight : SpaceShipOne piloted by Mike Melvill . June 21 , 2004 First spacecraft to orbit Saturn : Cassini-Huygens . July 1 , 2004 Science , Discoveries , Inventions , and Innovations First woman officially recognized for a scientific position : Caroline Herschel Natural History First homo sapiens  : the Omo Remains include Omo I , the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens ( idaltu ) , dated to around 190 , 000 years ago . This is considerably older than the 160 , 000-year-old Herto remains , which had been thought to be the earliest humans , and suggests that , if humans did originate in Africa as is currently thought , they did not expand from there for much longer than previously thought . First observed transit of a planet across the sun , Mercury , by Pierre Gassendi in 1631 . First international scientific collaboration : Observation of the transit of Venus 1761 and 1769 First confirmation of an active volcanic eruption occurring on a seamount : by scientists at the University of Hawai‘i on Lo‘ihi in 1996 Life Sciences First vaccination : smallpox , Edward Jenner , 1796 First whole-body scanner and x-ray machine : Dayton Miller ( Case School of Applied Science ) , Cleveland , Ohio , 1896 First blood transfusion : conducted by Dr. George Crile , Cleveland , Ohio ( 1905 ) First heart defibrillation : conducted by Dr. Claude Beck , Cleveland , Ohio ( 1947 ) First artificial pacemaker implant into a human : By a Swedish team using a pacemaker designed by Rune Elmqvist working under the direction of Åke Senning , 1958 . The patient was Arne Larsson . First coronary artery bypass surgery : conducted by Dr. Rene Favaloro , Cleveland , Ohio ( 1967 ) First heart transplant : First attempted by James Hardy , but the lack of a human donor forced him to transplant a chimpanzee heart instead , which failed shortly after . The first successful transplant was performed by Christiaan Barnard on December 3 , 1967 . First implant of an artificial lung : First artificial pacemaker implant into an infant : Into Jason A. Haines when he was 16 hours old , July 26 , 1974 . First `` test-tube baby `` : Louise Brown , born July 25 , 1978 in England . First official recognition of AIDS : Centers for Disease Control issued a press release describing five cases in Los Angeles . June 5 , 1981 First person to be convicted by the process of DNA fingerprinting : Colin Pitchfork . 1988 First person to be exonerated by the process of DNA fingerprinting : Richard Buckland . 1988 First face transplant : Isabelle Dinoire , November 5 , 2005 . Commodities First bottled food : in 1809 the French confectioner Nicolas François Appert developed a method of vacuum-sealing food inside glass jars First canned food : issued by the French Army First can-opener : invented 30 years after the first canned food First toothbrush First toothpaste Traffic Lights Main article : Traffic Lights First traffic lights installed ( gas lamp )   : outside Houses of Parliament , London . December 10 , 1868 First traffic lights installed ( electric )   : by Salt Lake City policeman Lester Wire . 1912 First traffic signal system installed  : by the American Traffic Signal Company on the corner of 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland , Ohio . August 5 , 1914 First three-color traffic lights installed  : in New York and Detroit . 1920 First automatic traffic lights installed  : in Wolverhampton , England . 1927 Information and Communications Technology Communication satellite firsts  : Main article : List of communications satellite firsts First telecommunications system : Claude Chappe 's semaphore lines . Between Paris and Lille in 1792 First telephone message : Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 : `` Mr . Watson -- come here -- I want to see you . `` First case of an algorithm written for a computer : Ada Byron 's notes on the analytical engine written in 1842 First programmer : Ada Lovelace ( 1815-1852 ) First programmable digital computer : Z3 , 1941 First programmable electronic computer : Colossus , 1943 First e-mail : started around 1965 First e-mail spam : sent using CTSS MAIL about 1971 , at a time of campus unrest and anti-war rallies in the USA First reigning monarch to e-mail : sent by Queen Elizabeth II from a British army base in 1976 First usage of a webcam : Trojan room coffee pot , 1991 First electronic payment over the Internet : PaySafe , 1992 First instant messaging service : ICQ released in November , 1996 Nuclear weapons First nuclear weapon detonation : Atom bomb named `` The gadget `` during the `` Trinity test `` near Alamogordo , New Mexico , July 16 , 1945 First nuclear weapon detonation used in war : Atom bomb named `` Little Boy `` during World War II on Hiroshima , Japan , August 6 , 1945 Sports First footballer to be knighted : Sir Stanley Matthews , ( 1965 ) First human to run a mile under 4 minutes : Roger Bannister , ( 1954 ) First person to swim the English Channel : Matthew Webb , ( 1875 ) First woman to swim the English Channel : Gertrude Ederle , ( 1926 ) First person to complete a long distance swim in all 5 oceans of the world  : Lewis Gordon Pugh , ( 2005/2006 ) First free diver to descend 100 metres ( 330 feet ) in water  : Jacques Mayol , November 23 , 1976 First Olympian disqualified for drug use : Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall at the 1968 Summer Olympics First bungee jump : by four members of the Dangerous Sports Club led by David Kirke , from the 250ft Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. 1 April , 1979 First woman to bicycle around the world : Annie Londonderry , ( 1895 ) First mother and son to row any ocean : Janice Meek and Daniel Byles , ( 1998 ) Literature First novel about invasion : The Battle of Dorking ( 1871 ) , by George Tomkyns Chesney . First novel about spies : The Riddle of the Sands ( 1903 ) , by Erskine Childers or The Spy , by James Fennimore Cooper ( 1821 ) ( depends on your source and interpretation ) . First American novel : The Power of Sympathy , by William Hill Brown . Other First person to wear a bikini : Micheline Bernardini . July 5 1946 See also List of firsts in India This is an incomplete list , which may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness . Revisions and sourced additions are welcome . Categories : Innovators | Innovation | Dynamic lists In other languages : Suomi | Slovenščina | Tagalog Spaceflight records 