Firsts in the World Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which South African surgeon performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant, in Cape Town in December 1967, on a patient who lived for eighteen days afterwards?

Question 2

Which engineer made the first call on a handheld mobile phone, in April 1973, standing on a New York pavement and ringing a rival researcher at a competing firm to tell him it worked?

Question 3

Which British medical student became the first athlete to run a mile in under four minutes, timed at 3 minutes 59.4 seconds on a wet cinder track at Oxford in May 1954?

Question 4

Which Portuguese navigator led the first European voyage to sail all the way to India by sea, rounding the southern tip of Africa and reaching the port of Calicut in 1498?

Question 5

Which country was the first to use paper money, issuing state-backed notes in the eleventh century after private merchants' printed receipts had already circulated for decades?

Question 6

Who became the first woman to fly in space, circling the Earth 48 times over three days aboard a Vostok capsule in June 1963, two years after the first man's flight?

Question 7

Which film was the first to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, a First World War aviation drama honoured at the inaugural ceremony in 1929?

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About Firsts in the World

Every 'first' is really a story about a threshold, the moment something went from impossible to done, after which the world quietly rearranged itself around the new fact. Some are single events with a date and a name: the first powered flight, twelve seconds long, near a North Carolina beach in 1903; the first human in orbit, one lap of the planet in 1961; the first four-minute mile, run on a wet Oxford evening in 1954. Others are slower, the first national park, the first underground railway, the first photograph, things that were argued over, funded, failed at, and only later recognised as the start of something.

This quiz collects those thresholds from every part of the world and every kind of human effort: exploration, science, sport, politics, technology, art and medicine. It asks who first reached the South Pole, which country first let women vote in national elections, which people first pressed writing into clay, which surgeon first moved a beating heart from one body to another, and who put the first page on the World Wide Web and then gave it away.

'Firsts' come with two traps, and the quiz tries to handle both honestly. The first is disputed priority. Plenty of famous inventions had several people racing toward them, the telephone, radio, the aeroplane, photography itself, and the person history remembers is often the one who patented, published or publicised first, not necessarily the one who was earliest. Where a claim is genuinely contested, the answer explanation says so and names the rivals. The second trap is a narrow, Western-centred view of who did things first. Movable type was in use in China around 1040 and survives in a Korean book from 1377, long before Gutenberg. Cuneiform and hieroglyphs appeared at roughly the same moment on different rivers. Many of the oldest firsts in mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy and city planning belong to Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China, and the quiz deliberately casts a wider net than the usual list.

Each question describes the achievement without naming the person, country or thing responsible, and gives you four choices. The answer then fills in the date, the circumstances, what made it possible, who came a close second, and what happened afterward. Where a freely licensed image exists that shows the scene, the object or the setting, but not the face or the name of the answer, it is shown with the question.

The appeal of a firsts quiz is that the answers tend to stick. A fact with a clear before-and-after, nobody had done this, then this person did, and nothing was the same, is far easier to hold on to than an isolated date. Learn who first stood on the Moon, first climbed Everest, first sailed around the world, and you are also learning the shape of how those fields developed. The wording is kept plain, and every claim has been checked against reliable sources.