- Do you know when the first modern T-shirt was made?
Everything that can happen happens once for the first time. Occasionally, those first times can be fascinating, funny, or just plain weird.
Continuing the Oddee tradition, we’re bringing you the seventh edition of our Weird World Firsts list. On the menu this time are the invention of a common garment, medical breakthroughs, and a bizarre quirk of fate that made an animal extinct twice.
Let’s get to it.
1. World’s First Automobile — 1770
Popular wisdom states that Karl Benz built the first automobile in 1886. In reality, the automobile was already more than a century old at that point.
In 1769, French army officer and inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot designed the Cugnot Fardier à Vapeur. This steam-powered contraption had wheels and an engine, and it moved by generating its own power – in other words, it was an automobile.
It was a very, very bad automobile, though. Cugnot designed it to haul heavy artillery, but the steam wagon could barely move unladen. It was so front-heave that it tipped over easily, its boiler needed reheating every 15 minutes, and its top speed was a blistering 2.25 mph.
Still, Cugnot’s invention earned him the French King’s personal thanks and a state pension.
2. World’s First Topical Anesthetic — 15th Century
Today, surgeons can carry out surprisingly complex operations with topical anesthetics (that is, anesthetics applied externally that numb the topmost tissue layers). In general, anesthetics are a fairly new invention, but there are some outliers.
Such as this Chinese topical anesthetic from around the year 1400.
In the eastern Chinese city of Jianying, archeologists discovered surgical instruments from the Ming dynasty. The scissors and tweezers bore plant residue from Chinese wolfsbane.
On its own, the plant is toxic. But if it’s treated with various substances – including human urine – it can become only numbing instead of deadly.
So, the ancient Chinese surgeons rubbed pee-soaked leaves onto their instruments. Hygienic.
3. World’s First Mummy — 250 Million BC
We tend to associate mummies with ancient Egyptian or Inca funeral practices. But anybody can mummify if they die in a sufficiently dry environment – such as this Lystrosaurus, which is the oldest known mummy.
Despite its name, the lystrosaurus wasn’t a dinosaur but a pig-sized therapsid, a much older creature and an ancestor of modern mammals. In 2022, researchers discovered fossils of Lystrosaurus mummies in South Africa.
These mummy-fossils were remarkable because, due to their earlier mummification, they preserved details regular fossils rarely do. For instance, some had their skin virtually intact, looking almost like it did 250 million years ago.
4. World’s First (Possible) Gay Couple — 2500 BC
In 1964, archeologists unearthed an unusual tomb in Saqqara. It housed two sarcophagi, and the paintings and hieroglyphs on the walls describe the lives and careers of a couple.
But the sarcophagi contained male corpses, and the paintings depict two men.
According to the ancient writings, the tomb houses Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, the chief manicurists of Pharaoh Nyuserre Ini. On the walls of their grave, they’re depicted facing and hugging each other and carrying out their tasks in the same manner as married couples in other tombs.
However, the hieroglyphs also reveal that both had wives and children. But why weren’t these men then buried with their families and instead each other?
Seems like a complicated relationship.
5. World’s First T-Shirt — 1913
The T-shirt has become such a ubiquitous garment that you probably don’t realize how new it is. In fact, mass-produced T-shirts are barely a century old.
Sure, people have been trimming off the sleeves of their shirts, probably for as long as shirts have existed. In the late 19th century, miners would often cut off the sleeves of their undershirts to cope with the hot mine shafts.
The modern T-shirt dates to 1913, when the U.S. Navy started issuing them to sailors as an undergarment. And that’s what it was for the next few decades – underwear that nobody should see.
However, after World War II, returning veterans and rebellious teens started appearing in public in their T-shirts. The rest is cultural history.
6. World’s First Animal to Go Extinct Twice — 2003
If you go extinct, that’s it. It’s game over. No animal can truly come back from the dead.
No animal except the Pyrenean ibex. The last of these Spanish mountain goats died in 2000, ringing the death knell of its species.
However, technology had advanced far enough that researchers could seriously ask if they could resurrect the Pyrenean ibex. In what became a scientific breakthrough, they were successful. Using cloning technology and a surrogate goat mother, a newborn Pyrenean ibex brought the species back to life in 2003.
Sadly, the female baby ibex had a serious birth defect in its lungs. It lived only for a few minutes before dying.
With it, the Pyrenean ibex became extinct for the second time. As such, this species is the first animal to return from extinction and also the only animal to die off twice.
Don’t miss the previous parts of our World’s First series!