Did You Know This About New Hampshire? We Have a Lot of Firsts

New Hampshire Firsts, we are a trendsetting State

There are a lot of firsts to come out of our state, many of which I didn’t know about since I was not raised here. I spent many years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and, as you can imagine, there is a lot of talks there about the Declaration of Independence. There is Independence Hall, Ben Franklin’s grave, and the Constitution Center but I was shocked to find out that New Hampshire was the first state to declare independence from England. I guess I didn’t spend a lot of time with my history books in high school.

First Man to Space

Space travel has been in the news a lot with the first tourist-only space flight ending successfully this weekend. Virgin Galactic is preparing to take space tourists into space along with Jeff Bezo’s company Blue Origin. But the first man in space was Alan Shepard who was born and raised in Derry, New Hampshire. I’m confident he was also the first New Hampshire resident to play golf in space according to onlyinyourstate.com.

Another Shocking First

New Hampshire was also the first state to introduce a statewide lottery back in 1963. If you are from New Hampshire, I am sure none of this is news but there may be some people like me out there just getting to learn how awesome our state is or have forgotten their history. Now we even have multistate lotteries like the Mega Millions and Powerball. There are six states that still do not have a lottery. According to onlyinyourstate.com, I was disappointed to learn the inventor of the alarm clock was from New Hampshire. Levi Hutchins invented the world’s first alarm clock back in 1787. Hutchins was from Concord, New Hampshire and personally, I will never forgive him.