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Photo: Courtesy of the Pro Football Hall of FameThe Pro Football Hall of Fame may be in Canton, Ohio, but the sport’s first professional contest was played in Pittsburgh. On Nov. 12, 1892, the Allegheny Athletic Association defeated the Pittsburgh Athletic Club with the help of William (Pudge) Heffelfinger, who was openly paid $500 to play the game—the first verifiable evidence of a player being paid.
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Emojis and emoticons were created right here in Pittsburgh! In 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed on a CMU online message board the use of 🙂 or 🙁 to indicate whether a post was satire.
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Photo: Ray Hennessy/UnsplashEach winter in Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland, hundreds of townspeople throw young birds off cliffs—but for a good reason! Fledgling puffins historically follow moonlight as they prepare to launch from their cliffs and fly to sea, but city lights now lead many birds astray, requiring human intervention to point them in the right direction.
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Illustration: Courtesy of the B-25 Recovery GroupThe B-25 “Ghost Bomber” has captured the imagination of Pittsburghers since it disappeared into the Monongahela River 70 years ago. The bomber splashed down near what is today the Homestead Grays Bridge in January 1956 and was never recovered.
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The most frequently exhibited artist in the history of the Carnegie International is Pittsburgh-born painter Johanna Hailman, who appeared in the majority of the exhibitions between 1896 and 1955.
