1666 ..... U.K ..... according to Samuel Pepys, the FIRST waistcoat was worn by King Charles 11. The King was so overweight that he left the bottom button undone, a fashion custom followed to this day

1783 ..... FRANCE ..... the FIRST man carried aloft in a balloon was Francois Pilatre de Rozier who ascended in a tethered Montgolfier hot-air balloon to 84 feet, the limit of the restraining rope. The hot air was provided by a straw-fed fire below the fabric envelope

1842 ..... IRELAND ..... the FIRST issue of the Nation newspaper came out in Dublin. The paper was the brainchild of Thomas Davis and his friend John Blake Dillon and the FIRST issue contained a poem by James Clarence Mangan. Among the other contributors was Jane Elgee, later the mother of Oscar Wilde

1895 ..... U.K ..... the FIRST motor show was held at the Agricultural Show Ground in Tunbridge Wells. Its organizer was the motoring pioneer Sir David Salmons 

1918 ..... U.K ..... the FIRST oil well in Britain was inaugurated at Hardstoft in Derbyshire 

1928 ..... the airship Graf Zeppelin completed its FIRST transatlantic flight 

1951  ….. U.S.A ..... the I Love Lucy show made its prime-time debut on CBS. It was one of the FIRST shows to be filmed rather than performed live and was also the FIRST show to be filmed before a live audience ..... and   ….. U.K ..... the FIRST televised party political broadcast was given by the Liberal Party 

2003 ..... China launched its FIRST manned space mission and became the third country in history to send a person into orbit. Lt Col Yang Liwei lifted off in a Shenzhou 5 (Divine Vessel) rocket from the Gobi desert in North West China in a flight which was expected to last for about 20 hours and orbit the Earth fourteen times