First Place in History - Not so Fast

A second look at Rosa Parks, Magellan, James Watt and others

President Kennedy had a saying on his desk that read "Life Isn't Fair". Sometimes that unfairness is minor and easily brushed off. Other times it could send your name from the history books into oblivion. Being recognized as the first person to - whatever - feeds the ego, brings fame and fortune, and puts your name up there in lights. First man on the moon, first person to climb Mount Everest, someday the first person to set foot on Mars; all such things get your name writ large and you live on after you're long gone. But sometimes fate hands it to someone else.

The following are ten such instances; people who've slipped into neglect. Some will make you wish life had been fairer while others may seem like splitting hairs.

Rosa Parks did a brave thing considering the times she lived in. The south in the fifties didn't tolerate blacks pushing their rights and when Parks wouldn't give up her seat on a bus it took an act of courage to face the ramifications. What it did was set in motion a movement that ended in civil rights legislation. But she really wasn't the first. A fifteen year-old girl named Claudette Colvin on March 2, 1955, nine months before Parks, was ordered to move from her seat and when she didn't was handcuffed by police and removed from the bus. So why didn't she become the symbol for the movement? It seems she wasn't the right kind of symbol. People felt Parks was an adult and that would have more of an impact than a teenager. Colvin moved to New York City and became pregnant. Colvin herself has said that she felt Parks had the "right" hair and looks. After her arrest, Colvin was actually shunned by parts of the community.

When you mention the sun being the center of the solar system and the Earth revolving around it, one name pops up immediately - Copernicus. He did propose a fully predictive model, but the idea had been proposed with a logical explanation nearly two thousand years earlier by a man named Aristarchus. People in his day disagreed with him because they figured that if the Earth moved there should be parallax with stars (they would seem to move from their position as the Earth moved). Aristarchus believed the universe and sun were larger than the Earth and the stars were so far away there wouldn't be parallax so there was no reason why the Earth couldn't revolve around the sun.

Proving the Earth is a sphere has been laid at the feet of Columbus for some time, but again we have to go back to the Greeks for the real truth. Actually, it was a nineteenth century myth that the Church thought the world was flat and Columbus set to prove them wrong. Even people in the middle ages believed it was round. Aristarchus, (310-230 BC) measured angles of shadows between two cities and found them different which wouldn't happen on a flat Earth. Eratosthenes, around 200 B.C. using angles between two cities in Egypt and assuming the Earth was a sphere, gave an excellent calculation of its circumference. Aristotle ( 384-322 BC ) seeing the shadow of the Earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse, seeing different stars as he traveled north, watching ships slowly disappear over the horizon, and looking at the sun and moon, drew the same conclusion.

We all remember that picture of Balboa, flag raised standing in the surf of the Pacific Ocean (called the South Sea at that time) and garnering the accolade of the first person to see it in 1513. What then of the Portuguese navigator Antoine de Abreu who went on the Molucca expedition in 1512 and viewed Timor and the Banda Islands right there on the Pacific Ocean?

James Watt (1736-1819) has always been synonymous with the invention of the steam engine. What he did was make it better, more efficient. Now, we could go back to Hero of Alexandria (10-70 AD) who created the aeolipile that spun a ball using steam power, Blasco de Garay's attempt in 1543 to use steam to move paddles on a boat, or to Giovanni Battista della Porta in 1601 who described a machine that could be used to raise water and accurately described the necessary presence of a vacuum created by steam. But you have to give the nod to Thomas Savery (1689) and Thomas Newcomen (1712). Savery received a patent for a steam machine that could pull water out of coal mines. Newcomen's engine did the same except the intensity of the pressure came from atmospheric pressure and not just steam.

Mention Ferdinand Magellan and the reply is he was the first to circumnavigate the Earth in 1519. He would have if he hadn't been killed by natives in the Philippines halfway through the voyage. Two ships survived the encounter, the Trinidad and the Victoria. The Trinidad went east back to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. The Victoria under the ships master Juan Sebastian del Cano returned to Spain arriving with only 18 survivors. At first del Cano was a national hero but Magellan's role and credit grew eclipsing him. Del Cano's coat of arms is a globe with the motto "Primus Circumdedist me (First to circumnavigate me).

For the first person to round the Cape of Good Hope (tip of Africa) things aren't so clear cut. Bartholeomew Dias sailing for Portugal (1488) is usually given credit and that may be where it belongs, except for a curious statement by the Greek historian Herodotus. According to him the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho (610-595 B.C.) sent Phoenicians out to go around Africa possibly for defensive purposes, although there is no mention of this in Egyptian literature. Phoenicians had already sailed into what is now the Atlantic part way down the West African coast to the Cameroons and east African coast as far as present day Zimbabwe. Giving them first place in rounding the tip of Africa is based on one sentence in Herodotus where he says "The Phoenicians made a statement which I myself do not believe to the effect that when they sailed west around the southern end of Africa they had the sun on their right". The sun is always on your right when rounding Africa's tip going west. Dias gets the nod purely because of better evidence.

This next example is one where the people in first place deserve to be there but that another person should also be included. In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick described the double helix structure of DNA and how the bases were paired. Crick and Watson along with Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Left out was Rosalind Franklin who did as much to prove the double helix as any of the others. But, she was a woman and at that time woman couldn't even eat lunch in the common room with the men (this is in England). Between 1951 and 1953 she came close to solving the DNA structure with excellent crystallographic X-ray portraits of DNA. Those pictures were shown to Watson who immediately saw the solution to DNA. Watson and Crick did make it known about Franklin's contribution (her supporting article had been published along with Watson's and Crick's in the journal Nature) but, unfortunately, Franklin died two years after the discovery. When it came time for the Nobel Prize to be awarded in 1962 she was left out because the prize can't be awarded posthumously.

When it comes to baseball, for many Abner Doubleday is the man who concocted the game we now know. But that is now mostly considered a myth. Ball and stick games can be found as far back as ancient Egypt. In England a publication in 1744 mentions a game called "Rounders" that had some of the features of baseball. When it got to this country it was called "Town Ball" that could have as many as 25 players and you could throw the ball at a player to get him out. By the end of the nineteenth century some people, Albert Spalding, equipment manufacturer, among them, didn't like the idea of an American game starting in England. Based on the testimony of one Abner Graves who said Doubleday had invented the game when they were in school, a committee decided he was the founder. Graves later shot his wife, was declared criminally insane and spent the rest of his life in a mental institution. Doubleday never said he invented the game and never mentions he did in any of his writings. At present the nod goes to an Alexander Cartwright who in 1845 did come up with many of the rules that now govern the game. Known at the time as the Knickerbocker Rules they included such rules as the diamond, four flat bases, 9 players, and can't hit the runner with a ball to get him out. The first game under the new rules was played in Hoboken, NJ on June 19, 1846 between the Knickerbockers and the New York Nines. The Nines won 23-1.

This next one comes under the heading of what do you mean by flight. We all tip our hats to Orville and Wilbur Wright as the first people to fly a heavier than air aircraft under its own power. In 1903 at Kitty Hawk they did fly an airplane for 12 seconds off a catapult. Others did get a heavier than air plane off the ground but most were uncontrollable. Clement Ader is credited with a steam powered heavier than air flight in 1890 flying 50 meters before crashing. Gustave Whitehead in Connecticut in August 14, 1901 supposedly had a half a mile flight attested by others but, unfortunately, there were no photos. An earlier flight on July 31, 1894 was more of an accident. A steam-powered plane with Hiram Maxim and three others was tethered to the ground but came loose from its restraining rails and flew 600 feet at an altitude of three feet before crashing. Obviously, the aircraft wasn't controlled. In 1906 a Brazilian named Santos Dumont flew a plane, and while it was after the Wrights, his plane like earlier uncontrolled ones took off with wheels, whereas the Wrights plane took off with a catapult. Which would be considered a more conventional flight, off the ground with wheels or from a catapult?

These are ten instances where there is some dispute over first place. Sure, the conventional view can be supported in most of them. Magellan died and del Cano finished the voyage, but Magellan did set the whole thing in motion with the desire to accomplish a circumnavigation. James Watt made a better steam engine that hastened the Industrial Revolution. The Wrights plane had many features needed for flying plus photos of the event. And Copernicus wrote the logic behind a heliocentric view of the solar system. But the others do have a stake in being first and deserve credit. At the least, the lesson here is that, while we place some people first, they stand on the shoulders of others.