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grew in importance, Rockefeller’s wealth soared. His empire grew as he bought out smaller oil companies, and eventually, Rockefeller’s company controlled more than 90 percent of the American oil market. Many regard him as the richest man in history.

Bingo
    The first game of bingo can be traced back to 1530 to an Italian version called Lo Giuoco del Lotto D’Italia, or The Clearance of the Lot of Italy. That early game featured 90 balls instead of the 75-ball version common today and was played in a weekly tournament for the purpose of increasing Italy’s budget without imposing additional taxes. In 1929, bingo was first played in the United States at a carnival in Atlanta, Georgia. Dried beans were used as markers, and the game was known as beano. Its fun and popularity spread from there. At a New York party later in the year, Edwin Lowe, a toy salesman, overheard an overly excited tongue-tied lady yell out “Bingo!” instead of “Beano!” upon winning a game. Lowe developed and marketed the game with the new name bingo, and the phenomenon was born.

Biofuel
    The first biofuel—a solid, liquid, or gas fuel derived from relatively recently dead biological material—was wood. Wood has been in use ever since man first discovered fire for cooking and heating.
    The second most common type of biofuel is ethanol, a colorless liquid that’s been used by humans since prehistory as the intoxicating ingredient of alcoholic beverages. Ethanol is made by fermenting plant sugars and distilling the alcohol, and can be blended with petroleum-based gasoline as a fuel to lower emissions and increase engine performance. Ethanol was first prepared synthetically in 1826 through the independent efforts of Englishman Henry Hennel and S. G. Sérullas in France.

Bird Banding
    The first record of a metal band attached to a bird’s leg was around 1595, when one of France’s Henry IV’s banded Peregrine falcons was lost while chasing and attacking a bustard (a bird with long legs, a round body, and a fairly short beak). The falcon showed up a day later in Malta—about 1,350 miles away!—nonchalantly eating goat cheese and figs. The bird averaged flying 56 miles an hour for 24 hours. Until that day, no one knew falcons had such range. The first records of bird banding in North America are those of John J. Audubon, the famous American naturalist and painter, in 1803.

Birth Control Pill
    The first birth control pill, Enovid, was introduced in 1960 by G.D. Searle and Company. It came in two doses, 5 and 10 milligrams, and was delivered in a small bottle, much like all pill prescriptions of that time. Birth control pills were offered for approval to the Food and Drug Administration in 1957 as a means to treat menstrual disorders and infertility. It wasn’t until 1960 that the manufacturer submitted the same oral contraceptive (Enovid) for approval to prevent conception and unwanted pregnancies. The first pill, G.D. Searle and Company’s Enovid-10, contained 9.85 milligrams of the progestational hormone norethynodrel and 150 micrograms of the estrogenic hormone mestranol. That’s about 10 times the progestin and 4 times the estrogen contained in today’s birth control pills.

Black Hole Discovered
    In the summer of 1972, the first object to be generally recognized as a black hole was discovered by 28-year-old Charles Thomas Bolton, a part-time faculty member at the University of Toronto, Canada. While observing a couple binary stars (two stars that orbit each other), he made his discovery. The black hole in question was the x-ray binary star Cygnus X-1, whose companion was HDE 226868. Bolton detected Cygnus X-1’s presence at the center of the Milky Way by observing star HDE 226868 wobble as it orbited around a massive but collapsing “invisible star” (Cygnus X-1). He also observed the appearance of a stream of gas flowing from the star to Cygnus X-1, swirling around it at incredible speeds before vanishing. In 1967, John Wheeler,