On any given day, you can wake up and do literally millions of things. You can ride a horse, climb a mountain, eat a turnip, the sky is the limit. But have you ever stopped to think that there was a time when someone had to be first? Everything that has ever been done or will ever be done had to start somewhere. One person was the first and only person to do it, at least for a while. And even today, there are a few things that, in all the billions of people that exist and in all the years that are behind us, only one person has ever done in all of history.
10. Jim Kitchen has visited 193 countries plus space
There aren't many things left to explore in the world, but that doesn't mean people can't still do it in ways that leave the rest of us in their dust. Enter Jim Kitchen. He may not have broken new ground, but he's been to more of them than anyone else. Jim is the only person in the world to have visited every country on the planet, and he's also left this world to go to space. Basically, he's been everywhere.
You can go to Jim's website and see a detailed list of the countries he's visited, broken down by continent. He's got the ones you'd expect, like Australia or England, and then the more obscure ones, like the Comoros, Sao Tome, and of course, space, which he listed as the 194th place he's visited after 193 countries were in his memory.
Kitchen launched into space on one of Jeff Bezos' rockets after visiting all 193 UN-recognized countries over 30 years.
9. Only one man has eaten the world's hottest curry
YouTube is a vast place with many sub-genres that you can discover as you explore the various rabbit holes you find. One niche you can find on YouTube that has long been a staple is spicy food videos. Viewers love to watch people suffer through insanely hot peppers and curries, and only a handful of people have managed to eat the spiciest dishes. One of those people was Dr. Ian Rothwell, a man who claims to be the only person to eat what is known as the hottest curry in the world.
The curry was called the Widower and was made at Bindi's in Grantham, England. How hot was it? It was made from 20 Naga chillies and was reportedly worth around six million Scovilles. One Carolina Reaper, the hottest pepper in the world, can reach around 2.2 million Scovilles. This is the pure pepper, and there are extracts that make it even hotter. One of the hottest ever made is Mad Dog 357 Plutonium 9, which was valued at around nine million. So six million curries isn't unthinkable, it's just reckless.
Rothwell accomplished his eating feat in 2013, and apparently did it while hallucinating. This is a known side effect of consuming too much capsaicin, the compound in peppers that makes them hot. It's unclear whether the restaurant continued doing it after that, but it appears to be closed now, so no one can try it anymore.
8. Wisconsin has only executed one person.
Currently, 27 states in the United States still use the death penalty as a punishment, although it is rare in most of these states. Executions have largely ceased for a long time, although they have become more common in 2020, with more than a dozen death row inmates executed since then. More than 15,000 people have been executed in the history of the United States. However, only one person has received the dubious honor in Wisconsin: John McCaffary.
McCaffary was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife and was executed in 1851. It would be the first and last execution in Wisconsin, thanks to a botched and nightmarish effort that convinced all involved to abolish the punishment.
The sentence was death by hanging, but hanging is by no means ideal, and there’s a reason we don’t do it yet. Things can go wrong. In McCaffary’s case, he was hanged in front of a crowd of thousands. He didn’t die instantly, like in the movies, or even minutes later, like in the grim ones. He dangled from that rope for 15 to 20 minutes, struggling and slowly suffocating the entire time, while up to 3,000 people watched. The spectacle was considered so cruel that officials commuted the death penalty to life in prison.
7. Will Shortz is the only person in the world with a degree in puzzles.
You can get into college in a variety of complex subjects, from bagpipes to comedy. While it’s unlikely that many people get these degrees, they have to have someone interested in them for them to exist. Another extremely niche degree is in enigmatology, which is essentially a degree in puzzles. This one is so rare that a man named Will Shortz is apparently the only person in the world who has one.
How Shortz became the only accredited enigma master in the world is a bit misleading, since he developed the program himself at Indiana University back in 1974. Once he created the program, he took it, graduated, and became a full-fledged enigmatologist.
What to do with a little-known, one-of-a-kind degree? Shortz edited Games Magazine for 15 years, edited the New York Times Crossword Puzzle since 1993, and founded the American Crossword Tournament back in 1978. When you're one of a kind, you have a lot of options.
6. John J. Pershing is the only living person to have been awarded the rank of General of the Army.
The highest rank in the United States Army is General of the Army, and only one person has ever achieved this rank in his lifetime: John J. Pershing. The rank was also awarded to George Washington, but posthumously, in 1976, as part of America's bicentennial celebration.
Pershing received the rank in 1919 for his actions in World War I, which included preparing the forces for a war unlike any ever fought at the time. Congress created the rank specifically for him because it had never existed before. Since he received it, no one else has achieved the rank.
In the Navy there is a more or less equivalent rank called Admiral of the Navy, which was awarded to George Dewey.
5. Philip Noel-Baker is the only person to have won both an Olympic medal and a Nobel Prize.
A person can be proud of being the best at what you do and being recognized for it. It’s nice that your peers and the world at large can see the hard work you’ve put in to become a leader in your field, no matter what you do. But it’s exceptionally rare for a person to become a leader in more than one field, especially when they’re not even remotely similar. One of the rarest things in the world was achieved by Philip Noel-Baker, the only person ever to win a Nobel Prize as well as an Olympic medal.
Baker grew up an athlete and excelled in running. In 1920, he competed in the Antwerp Olympics and won a silver medal in the 1500 meters. Thirty-nine years later, the Nobel Committee would award him the Nobel Peace Prize for his work and advocacy for nuclear disarmament. He remained staunchly anti-war and supported the abolition of nuclear weapons until the 1980s.
4. Katherine Sullivan is the only person to have been to the deepest part of the ocean and to space.
Jim Kitchen may have seen the space and the world around us, but Kathryn Sullivan surpasses him in one respect - she is the only person to have braved the greatest extremes of our world, inside and out. Sullivan is the only person in the world to have walked from the greatest heights in space to the greatest depths of the ocean in the Mariana Trench.
Sullivan was the first woman to conduct a spacewalk in 1984, at an altitude of about 140 miles above the Earth's surface.
3. Deion Sanders is the only athlete to play in both the World Series and the Super Bowl
Some athletes manage to demonstrate their skill in more than one sport, but few ever make it to the Big Show in any sport, let alone more than one. So far, Deion Sanders is the only athlete to have proven his skill by winning both the World Series and the Super Bowl.
No one ever accused Sanders of being the best of the best when it came to baseball, but he did well enough with the Braves to post a .304 average and even lead the league in triples during the 1992 season. The team faced the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series and lost.
In the NFL, Sanders was a much more dominant player, making eight Pro Bowls, winning Defensive Player of the Year in 1994, and winning back-to-back Super Bowls in 1995 and 1996.
2. General Peter Conover Haynes was the only veteran of both the Civil War and World War I.
No one wants to go to war, but some people feel it is their duty to defend their country and their fellow citizens from any enemy that might threaten them. If a soldier is lucky, he will never have to risk his life, but some may have to do so several times over several wars. Peter Conover Haynes was one of those men, the only veteran of both World War I and the American Civil War.
Despite the 52-year age difference, Haynes first saw action in the Civil War in his early twenties. Born in 1840, he went to West Point and became a soldier, serving in the Union Army in 1861. He even fired the first shot at the Battle of Manassas. He eventually ended up in the Army Corps of Engineers building lighthouses after the war ended.
By the time World War I began, Haynes was out of service and in his 70s. But his skills were needed, so he returned to duty, although he remained in the States, serving as chief engineer in Norfolk.
1. Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin is the only person to parachute into a thunderstorm at nearly 50,000 feet.
If you've never skydived before, you may not know that the average fall takes about 5 minutes. For some of us, that's probably very fast, and if you're afraid of heights, it may seem like an eternity. It wasn't that long for Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin to parachute to earth in 1957.
Rankin is believed to be the only person in history to have skydived during a thunderstorm. His story pretty much explains why you never want to do that, if it wasn't obvious already.
After an engine failure in his F-8 Crusader, Rankin was forced to eject at 47,000 feet, traveling at about 624 miles per hour. After leaving the plane, Rankin entered a cumulonimbus cloud, a dense, massive cloud of unstable weather. When he bailed out, it was -50 degrees Celsius, and he was not wearing a spacesuit—only an oxygen mask.
Rankin immediately decompressed and began bleeding from nearly every orifice. He also found himself in a thunderstorm filled with rain and hail, with clouds so thick that visibility was nearly zero.
Instead of falling as gravity dictated, Rankin began to juggle with the updrafts of a thundercloud. He fell, and then was sucked back in. It took several minutes for his parachute to open, but it didn't matter.
Rankin rose and fell again and again. He said that at one point he felt sick from the motion. Lightning flashed around him, and the moisture in the air was so thick that he felt like he was drowning.
It took Rankin 40 minutes to break through the cloud and finally land, badly injured but alive.
I admire these people...🙏🙏🙏!!!