Leading the pack: Meet these members of the ‘Me First’ Club

The first person to get a speeding ticket for driving a horseless carriage (automobile) was Walter Arnold of the UK back in 1896. His imported Benz was burning up the road at a clip of 8 miles per hour through the town of Paddock Wood, Kent. The speed limit at the time was a pokey 2 miles per hour. Arnold paid a fine for his bravado.

Junko Tabei of Japan was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, a feat she accomplished in 1975. She also wrote seven books (another difficult endeavor). Astronomers named an asteroid and a mountain range of Pluto in her honor. 

The Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Mo., was the site of America’s first daytime bank robbery during peacetime. On Feb. 13, 1866, robbers pistol-whipped a cashier, killed another man and absconded with $60,000 worth of gold, silver, currency and bonds. There's speculation among historians that the James brothers may have been involved.

The first African American to play professional baseball was catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker, who made his debut in 1884 for the American Association’s Toledo Blue Stockings (six decades before Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League). 

The first planets discovered outside our solar system (exoplanets) were two bodies orbiting a distant pulsar. Radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail made their groundbreaking discovery on Jan. 9, 1992. Since then, astronomers have located many thousands of exoplanets. 

KDKA of Pittsburgh was the first radio station in America. It signed on in 1920, broadcasting returns from the election of President Warren G. Harding. A year later, the station did a play-by-play broadcast of a baseball game: the Pittsburgh Pirates vs. the Philadelphia Phillies. That same year, KDKA broke ground by broadcasting a college football game between West Virginia University and the University of Pittsburgh.

The first video uploaded to YouTube was entitled “Me at the zoo.” Only 18 seconds long, the video is still on YouTube and features a young man talking about elephants. Live since April 23, 2005, it currently has more than 175 million views and 11 million comments. 

On Oct. 24, 1901, Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to survive a trip in a barrel over Niagara Falls. She took the momentous plunge on her 63rd birthday.

The first president known to have had cats in the White House was Abraham Lincoln. He received cats Tabby and Dixie as gifts from Secretary of State William Seward. Lincoln also rescued three orphaned kittens while visiting Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War.