Free Firsts by Wilson Casey Page B

who was in competition with her to be the wife of Emperor Claudius. After Paulina’s death, Agrippina demanded to see her head as proof of death. Agrippina wasn’t sure her rival was dead until she identified Paulina’s distinctively discolored front teeth.
    Because teeth and dental structures may survive post mortem, identification by dental records is a reliable method still in use today. The procedure really began to take hold in 1924 and afterward, when August Vollmer, then chief of police in Los Angeles, California, implemented the first U.S. police crime laboratory.

Deodorant Soap
    In 1894, Lifebuoy Royal Disinfectant Soap was launched in the United Kingdom. The soap was red, same as it is today. The name was later changed to Red Lifebuoy Deodorant Soap with the directions: “Add water to produce lather. Use as regular soap.” Its popularity was the result of people beginning to seek out ways to improve their personal hygiene. Lifebuoy’s advertising campaigns were also the first to use the phrase “body odor.”

Detective Story
    On April 20, 1841, the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was published. Written by American author Edgar Allen Poe, it featured the first fictional detective, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. The tale is narrated by the detective’s roommate and is about Dupin’s extraordinary ability to solve a series of murders in Paris. Through this first detective story, Poe introduced the concept of applying reason to crime solving to literature.

Dialysis Machine
    In 1943, Dutch physician Willem J. Kolff invented the first practical artificial kidney dialysis machine called the Kolff Rotating Drum. Developed during World War II, the device used a 20-meter-long tube of cellophane casing as a dialyzing membrane. The tube was wrapped around a slatted wooden drum that was powered by an electric motor. As the drum revolved in a tank with dialyzing solution, the patient’s blood was drawn through the cellophane tubing. This semipermeable membrane allowed for the toxins in the blood to be removed and diffused into the dialyzing solution. The cleansed blood was then returned via the circuit back into the body. These first dialysis procedures took around 6 hours to complete.

Dice
    From around 3000 B.C.E., the first dice were used for fortune-telling, in religious divination ceremonies, for gaming, and for gambling. They were crudely made from the ankle bones, often called knucklebones, of sheep, llama, buffalo, and other hoofed animals. Some of the dice’s sides contained markings, a precursor to numbering. The playing of dice games probably originated in Egypt, where marked cubes have been found in ancient tombs. Some of these first dice were even altered for cheating. Dicing, as it was called, was a popular game. Dice were particularly significant to the ancients because gambling was an integral part of society.

Digital Camera
    In December 1975, Steven Sasson, an Eastman Kodak Company engineer in Rochester, New York, made a successful working prototype of a digital still camera. His 8-pound toaster-size contraption captured a black-and-white image on a digital cassette at a resolution of .01 megapixels. Sasson and his chief technician, Jim Schueckler, persuaded a female lab assistant to pose for them. The image took 23 seconds to record onto the cassette and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a connected television. It popped up on the screen, and with some minor adjustments, the first digital camera still picture was deemed acceptable.

Digital Music
    In 1951, the first known example of digital music made by a computer was a crackly recording made in Great Britain, when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recorded a musical performance for a children’s radio show. The music was recorded on a Ferranti Mark I computer, whose short-term random access memory stored and played “God Save the King,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and a short piece of Glenn