A Few Firsts:

• The first person to be killed in an auto accident in the United States was Henry H. Bliss, a 68-year-old real estate broker. On September 14, 1899, in New York City, Mr. Bliss stepped from a streetcar, turned to assist a woman passenger, and was hit by a cab.
  
• The Travelers Insurance Company probably issued the first accident policy in the United States to James Bolter of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1864. The policy covered Mr. Bolter for his walk from his job at the Post Office to his home on Buckingham Street. Cost of the premium: 2 cents.
• The first fatal plane accident occurred on September 17, 1908 - - the pilot in that crash was none other than Orville Wright. In mid-flight, the propeller broke and the plane plunged 150 feet. Orville suffered multiple hip and leg fractures but Lieutenant Thomas E. Selfridge of the U.S. Signal Corps., who was also on board, died.

This and That

• The ancient Greeks thought that if they ate parsley, they wouldn't get drunk. They were wrong.
• There is a town in Maryland called Accident. It sits on a major state highway linking western Maryland with the rest of the state. On the approach to the town is a road sign that doubles as a warning and is always true, no matter what the traffic condition. The sign says: ACCIDENT AHEAD
• According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, if you stripped absolutely all the fat off both a piece of pork and a piece of beef, you couldn't taste the difference.
• An eighteenth century Parisian named Jean Jacques Perrett became tired of having his face cut while his barber shaved him. Wouldn't shaving be much safer and more comfortable, he wondered, if a wooden guard were attached to the straight razor blade so that only a snip of the blade protruded? And so was born the safety razor.
• Wanting always to be prepared, a Cincinnati man wrote to Washington for a copy of the U.S. Government publication #15.700, Handbook for Emergencies. Shortly thereafter he had his first emergency: he received 15,700 copies of the handbook.
• A persons hair cannot turn white overnight because of some terrible tragedy or frightening experience or for any other natural reason. However, there may be a possibility that a sudden loss of dark hair (due to a disease called alpopecia areata) was involved in the very few documented cases where a persons hair seemed to turn white overnight. With less brown hair to cover the gray it would appear that a persons hair had changed color.
• La Paz, Bolivia, which is about 12,000 feet above sea level, is nearly a fireproof city, and the fire engine ordered out of civic pride gather dust in their firehouses. At that altitude, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere barely supports fire.
• Benjamin Franklin's kite-flying experiment was a success. Not so for the next person who attempted the feat. Trying to repeat the sentry-box experiment, Russian physicist G.W. Richman was killed in St. Petersburg in 1753 when a "palish blue ball of fire, as big as a fist, came out of the rod" and struck him in the head. Richman died instantly from the lightning bolt and became the first martyr to the new age of electricity. From: They All Laughed, by Ira Flatow

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