Bristol has always been a city where things happen, a place ahead of the rest of the country and indeed the world - even though those in the London slow lane might dismiss it as a place for provincial carrot-crunchers and oiks.

But when you bake bread with self-raising flour before huddling under your blanket with a cup of hot Ribena and a chocolate bar tonight, you'll be doing the most Bristolian things ever.

Or when you drive down a road on the way back from your Methodist Church to enjoy a nice dessert sherry while watching Pirates of the Caribbean, you're as Bristol as the Feeder and as gert lush as Fred Wedlock.

READ MORE: The 75 Bristol legends from the past 1,000 years

For Bristol and its people have invented or created many things which have traversed the world, and given the city's famed penchant for understatement and laid back modesty, perhaps the rest of the world doesn't quite appreciate just how much Bristol has given the rest of the world.

So this is an attempt to make sure everyone knows just what Bristol can claim as its own. A city of firsts, in chronological order...

1330 - The blanket

Fancy earning thousands for doing nothing?

Before a Flemish weaver called Thomas Blanket set up what at the time was probably the first or biggest cloth factory in medieval Bristol, most people slept in their clothes on sacks of wool or straw and if it was cold might have had an animal skin to throw over themselves.

The rich would have had hand-woven woollen covers, but they were expensive. Thomas Blanket was one of many Flemish weaver invited over to England by King Edward III in 1327 because he wanted England's vast cloth industry to expand. We had the sheep, but exported the wool. Blanket set up in Bristol, and got into a spot of bother with the local merchants because he started bringing together all the hand weavers under one roof, cutting overheads and creating a factory-like process. The King backed him, though, and soon he and the workers there were churning out more affordable, mass-produced, tightly-woven woollen covers that people could afford. They were called blankets.

Now, blanket, or blanquette, is French for a white covering, so it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation with regards the name - Thomas Blanket probably got his name because of his trade in the first place, but... let's cross live to Bristol Times expert on this, Eugene Byrne, who in 2012 explored the seemingly fanciful idea that Bristol invented the blanket.

He said that there are references to blankets from Bristol in medieval Oxford, and Victorian histories in America place the creation of the blanket as a specific thing produced in Bristol. So there may be something in it after all.

1497 - English spoken in America

Portrait of John Cabot

We step tentatively into the era of the colonisation of the world by white western Europeans now, with the famous Bristol story of John Cabot. It's laden with caveats, but there is a Bristol First in there.

To start with, he wasn't from Bristol - he was from Venice and his name was actually Giovanni Cabotti, so say that next time you go there for a cheeky Nandos - however, his ship and his crew were from Bristol.

They were the first to land on mainland North America - Christopher Columbus only got as far as the islands of the Caribbean in 1492. But they weren't the first Europeans to set foot on mainland North America - 500 years earlier, the Vikings found, settled and lived for years in what is now eastern Canada - they called it Vinland.

And, of course, while Cabot and his Bristol crew were the first Europeans of the modern age to land in North America, there were about two million people already living there.

So what Bristol First can we ascribe to the men of the Matthew? Perhaps it can only be that the first English words spoken on mainland North America were Bristolian.

1718 - Pirates

Of course, there have been pirates ever since people started crossing the seas, but when the world thinks of the classic image of a pirate, it's one that has come straight down the Avon Gorge.

Many of the great pirates of folklore were real and from Bristol - people like John Rackham, better known as Calico Jack, Israel Hands - the real one, not the one from Treasure Island - and of course Edward Thatch, better known as Blackbeard.

Their dress, accent, style and mannerisms are what anyone dressing up as a pirate for Talk Like A Pirate Day will copy, and it's straight out of Bristol.

A lot of that also has to do with the way their facts transferred into fiction, from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island through to Robert Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver in the 1950 film version.

1739 - Methodist Church

The New Room Bristol / John Wesley’s Chapel

John Wesley wanted his evangelical brand of Christianity to be a complement to the Church of England, rather than in competition, but when he and his brother came to Bristol in the 1730s, he built a chapel in the image of how he wanted church to be.

The stunning New Room, with an octagonal lantern window and a double decker pulpit, was a new kind of church. Its pews were made from old ships timbers, and it had a school room to educate the local poor kids.

From this church, and others Wesley built, Methodism spread around the world. It's the only bit of Broadmead that Bristol City Council doesn't own, too.

1780 - Lead shot

Sheldon Bush and Patent Shot Company works, including the lead shot tower, in central Bristol. this picture was taken in 2002, before the surrounding area was redeveloped.

This story is one of the most remarkable Bristol Firsts, and yet there is shamefully hardly any recognition in the city. Until about 1780, no one knew how to make metal balls. Sounds a bit silly, but it's true - until this point lead shot used in muskets and pistols were irregular-shaped chunks of metal, and that meant they would fly off in all sorts of directions.

Then a plumber called William Watts had a dream. He said the idea came to him fully formed, and was so clear he had to act on it. The dream showed him that any liquid that falls from a height - be it raindrops from a cloud or molten metal from a great big cauldron - will form a sphere as it falls if it picks up enough speed. If molten metal does that, and then is cooled suddenly - say, by landing in water, you'll have perfectly-spherical pieces of metal.

Watts dug a deep cellar underneath his house in Redcliffe, but it wasn't enough of a drop, so he added a three-storey tower onto the roof. Heaven knows what the neighbours thought. But it worked, and by 1782 he'd patented the idea.

The invention of metal balls was a game changer. In the first place, it meant better guns - which was bad news for birds and animals, and also people. But it was also good news for a range of industries, who were able to make use of ball bearings in engineering.

There's still a lead shot tower, now redundant, in the same area next to the Floating Harbour today - a post-war version of the original.

1799 - Anaesthetic

Sir Humphry Davy
Sir Humphry Davy

Nitrous oxide - a gas with one part nitrogen to two parts oxygen - was first created by Joseph Priestley over the Wiltshire border in Calne in 1772. By 1800, young scientists were experimenting with it in Bristol. They had a regular supply of rich but ill people, ready to try anything, which is why they were visiting the hot wells at, er, Hotwells, and so Thomas Beddoes set up the Pneumatic Institution at numbers 6 and 7 Dowry Square in Hotwells, with the help of engineer James Watt, who created the equipment.

A young Cornishman called Humphry Davy was the institute's laboratory operator, and he experimented with NO2 with his friends, notably Coleridge and Robert Southey, and realised that it could be used as an anaesthetic.

The institute lasted less than two years, scuppered by a typhoid outbreak, but the advances in medicine, notably in equipment and the potential for gas to be used as an anaesthetic were taken to London by Humphrey Davy, and many are still in use today.

1820 - Proper roads

John Loudon Macadam, who invented modern road surfaces, in Bristol in the 1810s

John Macadam was a Scot who came to Bristol with an idea to create a proper road surface. The world was criss-crossed with dirt tracks, bumpy cobbled streets or muddy lanes, until Macadam got a job as the man in charge of roads in the city. It took him a few years, but he eventually persuaded the powers-that-be to let him try out his ideas of having different layers of different sized stones, in a strict and complicated order.

The first stretch of road they let him try was the problematic crossing of the marsh where Colliters Brook neared the River Avon at Ashton. The road between Bedminster and Ashton Court was a muddy flooded mess most of the time, but Macadam raised it at Marsh Lane, and then Ashton Road, and it worked.

The lower eight inches of road thickness was restricted to stones no larger than three inches across. The top two inch layer had to have stones three-quarters of an inch across. The workmen would check them by putting them into their mouths - if they couldn't fit, they were too big. The supervisors carried scales, it was done very precisely.

It was expensive, so the toll house was built at the end of North Street to charge people for using it. The toll house, and the road, is still there today, and someone built a football stadium next to it too.

Within three years, Macadamised roads were being laid across Britain and the USA, and within a few years someone had the idea of binding it all with tar - creating tarmacadam.

So next time you come off the Winterstoke spaghetti junction and turn left at the lights to head towards Greville Smyth Park, you're driving on what was the world's first macadamised road.

1837 - Goldilocks and the Three Bears

A young portrait of Robert Southey from around the time he lived in Kingsdown Parade, Bristol.

First written and published by Robert Southey, the Bristolian Wordsworth, the original tale was a bit darker than the one that ended up being a nursery book staple. Southey's bears discover a nasty old woman sleeping in their bed, rather than a beautiful young blonde.

1845 - Self-raising flour

Henry Jones, the Broadmead baker, who invented self-raising flour

Obviously people had been baking leavened bread for millennia, but the very first patent for self-raising flour came from Bristol. A baker in Broadmead perfected the recipe, and made an absolute fortune off it. Henry Jones' mixture was first unveiled and patented in 1845 and within a year, he'd won a royal warrant for supplying this new flour to Queen Victoria's household.

He was very good at marketing - the logo was a giraffe, and the advertising slogan was 'It Towers Above Them All' - which was lit up on Broadmead for the next 100 years or more, becoming quite the landmark in the city centre.

1847 - the chocolate bar

Now, people had drunk, and then eaten chocolate for 300 years or more in Europe, and for decades people had created bars of the stuff.

But what is a Bristol First is what Joseph Fry did in 1847, when he set up the world's first chocolate bar production line, in the world's first chocolate factory, in Union Street, right in the heart of Bristol. It caught on.

1860 - Cream sherry

Harveys Bristol Cream

Bristol had been importing blended sherry wine from Spain and Portugal and selling them to rich English people for centuries - they were called Bristol Milk, and it was a thing.

A family firm called Harvey's set up doing just that in 1796, and were experimenting with a new blend in about 1860. The story goes that one aristocratic lady was invited to Harvey's cellars in Bristol to try a new, richer blend they'd been work on. "If that's Bristol Milk, then this is the cream," she is reported to have said, and the name stuck.

They branded their new creation Bristol Cream, and trademarked it by 1882. It became one of the most popular drinks among the in-crowd of the Roaring Twenties in the US, and has stayed a household name ever since.


1873 - Easter Eggs

Like the Bristol First chocolate bar, we're back at the JS Fry factory about 26 years later. People had given each other highly decorated real eggs for centuries for easter, and chocolate eggs were made by chocolatiers in France and Italy in the 18th century. But again, Mr Fry and his production lines produced the world's first hollow, mass produced chocolate Easter eggs, and it also caught on - 80 million are consumed in Britain alone every year.

1933 - Ribena

Dr Vernon Charley, the inventor of Ribena, at Bower Ashton, Bristol in the 1930s

The Great Depression, a generation of impoverished children full of rickets and scurvy - they needed a hero, a champion. And cometh the hour, cometh the man – a chap called Vernon Charley, a scientist from the University of Bristol, working at the wonderfully-titled Long Ashton Agriculture and Horticultural Research Station.



In wartime, with oranges a thing of the past, Britain could grow blackcurrants and Ribena effectively stopped Britain losing the war which was a distinct possibility if a huge number of the nation had died of scurvy.

After the war, Charley took his blackcurrent cordial back to the Forest of Dean from whence he did once come, and set up a factory making the purple nectar - it's still there today.

1946 - Transgender phalloplasty

Michael Dillon had been Laura Maud Dillon in 1915, but knew he was really a man. By his early 20s, he came to Bristol and thanks to hormone therapy was already passing for a man, got a job as a mechanic, and was one of thousands of people who fought fires in the Bristol Blitz.

After the war, he persuaded the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies to perform a phalloplasty, giving him male genitalia. Gillies had been doing similar for men left scarred or disfigured in the war, but Dillon was the first transgender man in the world to undergo the surgery.

1965 Race Relations Act

Paul Stephenson OBE and Guy Bailey OBE, two of the Bristol Bus Boycott campaigners.

Alright, it was passed in London, by MPs and Lords and then the Queen, but it was forged in Bristol - by a determined group of freshly-minted Bristolians from the Caribbean, led by British-born Paul Stephenson, and supported by thousands of other Bristolians who refused to go on the buses until the bus company employed anyone and everyone who wanted a job.

The 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott was Britain's black civil rights movement - the campaigners won, the bus company and the union caved in, and within two years, what they had been doing - refusing to employ staff who weren't white - was made formally illegal across the country.

1976 Commercial supersonic flight

Concorde Alpha Foxtrot, flying for the last time above Bristol in 2003

Aeroplanes first went faster than the speed of sound just after World War Two, but it took a team from Bristol to turn supersonic flight into something anyone - with enough money, of course - could do.

They only ever made 20 Concorde in Bristol and Toulouse, six for prototypes and 14 that went into service, crossing the world at speeds not matched since. You could have your breakfast in London and your breakfast again in New York, it was the closest anyone has got to a time machine.

1979 The bungee jump

David Kirke makes the world's first bungee jump

No one will believe you went backpacking around New Zealand in your gap yah unless you have a GoPro headcam video of you leaping off a bridge with some elastic bands wrapped around your ankles.

And when you do do that, you're doing something that started in Bristol.

Well, sort of. For the Bristol First we are claiming here is the modern 'sport' of bungee jumping. It began on April Fools Day 1979, when the Dangerous Sports Club announced its presence in the city. David Kirke, Simon Keeling and Geoff Tabin jumped off the Clifton Suspension Bridge with elasticated ropes tied to their ankles, thus beginning the global bungee jump industry you see today.

Bristol Live caught up with David to mark the 40th anniversary of that momentous day, and what a tale he had to tell, for sure.

But David was keen to point out that they'd been inspired by seeing the 'land-divers' of Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, who show their courage to the ladies by building high scaffolding towers and leaping off with just enough vine tied around their ankles to make sure they don't hit the ground. It was first captured for Western eyes in the 1970s with an infamous showcase for the Queen's visit in 1974.

Even the word 'bungee' is a proper Bristol or West Country word - it started out life in the lanes of North Somerset as a word for something thick and squat, became what the schoolchildren of this area called fat, thick erasers in school, and that became the word for the thick elasticated rubber they used to propel gliders into the air in the 1930s.

1990 - Ultrasound scanners

Modern ultrasound scanners that let you see babies in the womb or tumours in your breast are the results of many different scientists developing and adapting and discovering new things all over the world. So it's not quite solely a Bristol First in and of itself, but Clifton boy Prof Peter Wells has made a number of significant breakthroughs.

No less than the Royal Society attributes to the Bristol scientist a number of 'notable contributions to the application of engineering and physics in medicine'. He is, they write, the originator and developer of instruments for ultrasonic surgery and ultrasonic power measurement, as well as the two-dimensional, articulated-arm ultrasonic general purpose scanner and the water-immersion ultrasonic breast scanner'.

He also discovered and demonstrated Doppler signal characteristics of malignant tumours, and then moved into the world of MRI scanners too. Prof Wells passed away in 2017.

...and what isn't a first...

Clifton Suspension Bridge

Fans of the history of Bristol most widely told will notice what appear to be glaring omissions here from the story of the city.

And it's true, there is no Clifton Suspension Bridge or SS Great Britain in this list. Neither is there a hot air balloon or a Wallace or a Gromit in sight either.

While it's true Brunel was an engineer who changed the world, it's tricky to ascribe Bristol Firsts to him - that is to say, things he created that were the first in the world.


The SS Great Britain was the biggest ship, by far, in the world when it was built. But it wasn't the first metal-hulled ship, and it wasn't the first with a screw propellor - Brunel had seen both of those things separately and brought them together - his genius being seeing the latest technology and adapting it to make it better.

And of course the Suspension Bridge is nowhere near the first suspension bridge in the world - it was built long after that, and even after Brunel's death, almost as a memorial to him.

Don Cameron's Bristol Belle was the first modern hot air balloon in Britain, but he and his team were adapting technology invented in the 1950s by an American.
