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Book of Firsts: First Time Almost Everything Happened
By Gordon Kerr
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About this ebook
‘It’s not winning silver; it’s losing gold’, says a famous Nike ad, hammering home the painful truth that posterity has little compassion for those who finish second. They are, more often than not, expunged from history, years – perhaps even decades – of grinding toil and desperate hope cast into the dustbin of history. Who really gives much thought these days to English aviator Percy Pilcher, who almost won the Palm for the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight several years before the Wright brothers, but crashed in a glider and died of his injuries? Who talks much these days about the American astronaut, Alan B. Shepard, the second man to go into space after Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin stunned the world with his daring flight into the unknown in 1961?
All that really matters is being first, whether it is the first hotel in Britain to have a microwave installed – the Kew Gardens Hotel in London – or the first person to ski down Mount Everest – Slovenian Davo Karnicar who did just that in almost five hours in 2000. History is kind to people who have succeeded. Who can forget the magnificent effort of English athlete Roger Bannister, who ran the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954, a feat said by many to be impossible? And how grateful are we for the inventiveness of men such as Scotsman John Logie Baird and the American Thomas Alva Edison who gave us television and the electric light bulb, respectively?
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Gordon Kerr
Gordon Kerr worked in bookselling and publishing before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of several titles including A Short History of Europe, A Short History of Africa, A Short History of China, A Short History of Brazil, A Short History of the First World War,A Short History of the Vietnam War, A Short History of the Middle East, A Short History of Religion and The War That Never Ended. He divides his time between Dorset and Southwest France.
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