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’s the limit. But do you ever stop to consider that there was a time that someone had to be the first? Everything that has ever been done or ever will be done had to start somewhere. One person was the first and only person to do that thing, at least for a while. And even today there are a few things, that for all the billions of people in existence and all the years we have behind us, that only one person has ever done in all of history.
10. Jim Kitchen Visited 193 Countries Plus Space
There’s not a lot of the world left to explore but that doesn’t mean people still can’t be doing it in ways that leave the rest of us in their dust. Enter Jim Kitchen. He may not have discovered new frontiers, but he’s been to more of them than anyone else. Jim is the only person in the world who has visited every single country on the planet and also left our world to visit space. Basically, he’s been everywhere.
You can head to Jim’s website and see the itemized list of countries he’s visited, broken down by continent. He’s got the ones you’d expect, like Australia or England, and then ones that are a little more obscure like Comoros, Sao Tome, and, of course, space which he listed as the 194th place he visited after 193 countries were left in his wake.
Kitchen got to go to space on one of Jeff Bezos’ rockets after visiting all 193 UN-recognized countries over the span of 30 years.
9. Only One Man Has Ever Eaten The World’s Hottest Curry
YouTube is a vast place with many subgenres you can discover as you go down the various rabbit holes you find. One niche you can find on YouTube that’s been a staple for a long time now 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 hottest of the hot things. One such person was Dr. Ian Rothwell, the man who lays claim to being the only person to eat what is known as the world’s hottest curry.
The curry was called the Widower and came from a restaurant called Bindi’s in the English town of Grantham. How hot was it? It was made with 20 Naga chiles and was reported to clock in at around six million Scovilles. A single Carolina Reaper, the hottest pepper in the world, might reach about 2.2 million. That’s pure pepper though and there are extracts that do get hotter. One of the hottest ever made is Mad Dog 357 Plutonium 9 which was rated around nine million. So a six million curry is not inconceivable, just ill-advised.
Rothwell performed his eating feat in 2013 and apparently did so while hallucinating. That’s a known side effect of consuming too much capsaicin, the compound in peppers that makes them hot. It’s unclear if the restaurant continued to make it afterward but it seems to be closed now so no one else can try it.
8. Only one Person Was Ever Executed in Wisconsin
Currently, there are 27 US states that still use the death penalty as a punishment, though it’s rare in most of those states. For a good deal of time executions had essentially stopped though they started to become more common in 2020 and over a dozen death row inmates have been executed since that time. In US history, over 15,000 people have been executed. In Wisconsin, though, it was just one man who holds the dubious honor – John McCaffary.
McCaffary was sentenced to death for murdering his wife and his execution was performed in 1851. It would be Wisconsin’s first and last execution thanks to a botched and nightmarish job that convinced everyone involved to do away with the punishment.
The sentence was death by hanging, but hanging is not ideal by any means, and there’s a reason we don’t still do it. Things can go wrong. In McCaffary’s case he was hanged before a crowd of thousands. He didn’t die right away like they do in the movies and not even after a few minutes like they do in grim movies. He dangled on that rope for between 15 and 20 minutes, struggling and slowly suffocating the whole time while as many as 3,000 people watched. The sight was considered so brutal it moved officials to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment.
7. Will Shortz Is the Only Person In the World with a Degree in Puzzles
You can get a college in all kinds of niche and perplexing subjects ranging from bagpiping to comedy. While it’s not likely a lot of people are getting these degrees, they must have someone interested in them in order for them to exist. Another extremely niche degree 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 it.
How Shortz became the only accredited puzzle master in the world is a bit of a cheat insofar as he also designed the program himself at Indiana University back in 1974. After creating the program he took it, graduated, and became a full-fledged enigmatologist.
What do you do with an obscure, one of a kind degree? Shortz edited Games Magazine for 15 years, has edited the New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993, and founded the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament back in 1978. When you’re the only one of your kind, you have a lot of options.
6. John J. Pershing is the Only Living Man to be Awarded Rank of General of the Armies
The highest rank in the United States Army is General of the Armies and only one person ever achieved that rank in their lifetime: John J. Pershing. George Washington was also given that rank but it was posthumously in 1976 as part of America’s bicentennial.
Pershing earned the rank in 1919 for his performance in World War One, which involved preparing a force for a war unlike any ever fought at the time. Congress created the rank specifically for him as it had never existed before. Since he received it no one else has achieved the rank, either.
The Navy has an equivalent rank, more or less, called Admiral of the Navy which was made for George Dewey.
5. Philip Noel-Baker Is The Only Person to Receive Both an Olympic Medal and a Nobel Prize
Becoming the best at what you do and being recognized for it is something a person can take pride in. It’s nice that your peers and the world at large can see the hard work you’ve put in to become the top of your field no matter what it is that you do. But it’s exceptionally rare that a person becomes the top of more than one field, especially when they’re not remotely similar. One of the rarest things in the world was achieved by Philip Noel-Baker, the only person ever to get a Nobel Prize and also an Olympic medal.
Baker was an athlete growing up and excelled at track. In 1920 he competed in the Olympic games in Antwerp and won a silver medal for the 1,500 meter. It would be 39 years later when the Nobel Prize committee would award him the Nobel Peace Prize for his work and advocacy for nuclear disarmament. He remained staunchly anti-war and in support of an end to nuclear weapons well into the 1980s.
4. Kathryn Sullivan Is The Only Person To Go to the Deepest Part of the Ocean and Into Space
Jim Kitchen may have seen the space and the world all around us but Kathryn Sullivan has him beat in one regard – she is the only person to have ventured to the greatest extremes of our world, inside and out. Sullivan is the only person in the world to have gone from its greatest heights in space to the greatest depths of the ocean in the Marianas Trench.
Sullivan was the first woman to perform a spacewalk in 1984 at about 140 miles above the surface of the earth.. But in 2020 she plunged to 7 miles below the surface where few humans have ever gone, making her the only one to have traveled to both extremes.
3. Deion Sanders is the Only Athlete to play in the World Series and the Super Bowl
A handful of athletes manage to demonstrate their skill in more than one sport but few ever make it to the Big Show in whatever their sport is, let alone in more than one. So far, Deion Sanders is the only athlete to ever prove his prowess by making it to baseball’s World Series and the Super Bowl.
No one has ever accused Sanders of being the best of the best when it comes to baseball, but he did well enough with the Braves to post a .304 average and he even led the league with triples in the 1992 season. The team faced the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series and lost.
In the NFL, Sanders was far more dominant. Eight Pro Bowl appearances, 1994 Defensive Player of the Year, and back-to-back Super Bowl wins in 1995 and 1996.
2. General Peter Conover Hains Was the Only Veteran of the Civil War and WWI
No one wants to go to war, but some people feel a duty to defend their country and their fellow citizens from whatever enemy may be threatening them. If a soldier is lucky, they will never have to put their life on the line, but some may have to do it multiple times across multiple wars. Peter Conover Hains was one such man, the only veteran of both World War One and the American Civil War.
Though separated by 52 years, Hains first served in the Civil War when he was 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 found himself in the Army’s Corps of Engineers building lighthouses after the war ended.
By the time WWI began, Hains was retired from duty and in his 70s. But his skill was needed, so he returned to duty, though he remained stateside, and served as Chief Engineer in Norfolk.
1. Lt. Col William Rankin Is The Only Person To Have Parachuted Through a Thunderstorm at Nearly 50,000 Feet
If you have never been skydiving before, you may not be aware that the average fall takes you about 5 minutes to complete. For some of us that’s probably very fast and if you’re afraid of heights that might seem like forever. This was not how long it took Lt. Col. William Rankin to parachute to earth back in 1957.
Rankin holds the distinction of being the only person to have parachuted through a thunderstorm in history. His story explains pretty clearly why you never want to do it, if it isn’t already obvious.
After an engine failure in his F-8 Crusader, Rankin was forced to eject at 47,000 feet at a speed of around 624 mph. After leaving the aircraft, Rankin got caught in a cumulonimbus cloud, a dense, massive cloud of erratic weather. It was -50 Celsius when he bailed, and he didn’t have a pressure suit — just an oxygen mask.
Rankin experienced decompression immediately and began bleeding from pretty much every orifice. He also fell smack into a lightning storm full of rain and hail with clouds so thick he had near zero visibility.
Instead of falling as gravity indicates one should, Rankin began to get juggled by the storm cloud’s updrafts. He’d fall and then get sucked up again. It was minutes before his chute even deployed, not that it made a difference.
Rankin rose and fell, again and again. He said he got seasick from the motion at one point. Lightning crashed all around him and the moisture in the air was so thick he felt like he was drowning.
It took 40 minutes for Rankin to make it through the cloud and finally touch down, badly injured but alive.