The “Only Person in History” Club

In June 2020, a 68-year-old former astronaut climbed into a deep-sea submersible and dropped nearly 11 kilometers into the Pacific Ocean. Kathryn D. Sullivan had already walked in space. Now she was descending to the Challenger Deep, the lowest point on Earth. When she surfaced, she quietly joined one of the strangest clubs in history: people who can say, with a straight face, “I am the only person who has ever done this.”

History is full of firsts and records. But “only person in history” is a different kind of claim. It is not just about being fastest or oldest. It is about occupying a weird, specific intersection of events, identities, and timing that no one else has ever hit.

The Reddit list you saw is really a list of statistical freaks. A French woman who outlived almost everyone who has ever lived. A man who was both the son and the father of U.S. presidents. A Civil War officer who lived long enough to wear a World War I uniform. A two-sport star who played in both the World Series and the Super Bowl. A Nobel laureate who also won an Olympic medal. And an astronaut who went from low Earth orbit to the bottom of the sea.

By the end of this story, you will know who these people were, what actually made them unique, and why “only person in history” claims are both more fragile and more interesting than they first appear.

What does “only person in history” really mean?

Before getting to the characters, it helps to define the game.

“Only person in history” claims usually rest on three things:

First, a clear, checkable definition. “Only person verified to live past 120” is specific. “Only person who truly loved liberty” is not.

Second, decent records. You can only be sure someone is the only one if you have some idea what everyone else did. That is easier for modern sports and Nobel Prizes than for, say, medieval peasants.

Third, a weird overlap. None of the people on the Reddit list did just one thing. Their uniqueness comes from combining categories: war + war, office + office, domain + domain.

“Only person in history” is a historical claim that someone is the sole verified example of a specific combination of traits or achievements. It depends as much on record-keeping and definitions as on the person’s actions.

That last part matters. If we change the definition a little, the claim can vanish. If new evidence appears, the uniqueness can evaporate overnight. So what? Because it reminds us that these viral factoids are really about how we record and value human lives, not just about trivia.

Jeanne Calment: the woman who (maybe) beat time

In February 1997, reporters crowded into a nursing home in Arles, France, to sing happy birthday to a tiny woman in a wheelchair. Jeanne Calment turned 122 that day. She would die six months later, at what is still, on paper, the longest human lifespan ever reliably recorded.

Calment was born in 1875. She supposedly met Vincent van Gogh as a girl. She lived through the Franco-Prussian War, two world wars, the invention of the airplane, and the rise of the internet. French officials had checked and rechecked her documents. By the time she died, she was the gold standard for human longevity.

So the Reddit line is technically right: Jeanne Calment is the only person in history verified as living past 120. No one else has crossed that line with documentation demographers accept.

But there is a catch. In 2018–2019, a group of Russian researchers argued that Jeanne was not Jeanne. They suggested that her daughter Yvonne had assumed her identity in the 1930s to avoid inheritance taxes, and that the woman who died in 1997 was in her 90s, not 122. French and international demographers pushed back hard, pointing to the weight of documentary evidence and the lack of a clear motive or proof for such an elaborate fraud.

Most experts still accept Calment’s age as valid. The case is a reminder, though, that “verified” is a human process. It depends on archives, bureaucracy, and trust in institutions.

Jeanne Calment’s record matters because it sets the outer edge of what we think a human lifespan can be. It shapes debates about aging, medicine, and whether there is a hard ceiling to human life, which is exactly the kind of boundary “only person in history” claims tend to probe.

John Scott Harrison: the man between two presidents

On March 4, 1889, as Benjamin Harrison took the oath of office in Washington, D.C., his father’s name was already in the history books. William Henry Harrison had been the ninth president of the United States, elected in 1840 and dead a month after taking office. Between them sat a quieter figure: John Scott Harrison.

John Scott Harrison is the only person in history to be both the son and the father of U.S. presidents. His father, William Henry, was the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe and the first president to die in office. His son, Benjamin, would lead the country through the late 19th-century battles over tariffs and civil service reform.

John himself never reached the White House. He served in Congress, farmed in Ohio, and tried to live a relatively normal life under the shadow of one famous father and the ambitions of a driven son.

His story got much stranger after his death. In 1878, John Scott Harrison died and was buried in North Bend, Ohio. When relatives went to the cemetery days later, they found his grave robbed and his body missing. The search led to the Medical College of Ohio in Cincinnati, where his corpse was discovered hanging on a rope in a dissection room, prepared for anatomy students. The scandal fed public outrage against “resurrectionists,” the body snatchers who supplied medical schools.

That grim episode is part of why we remember him at all. Without it, he might be a footnote between two presidents. Instead, he is a case study in how family dynasties and the messy realities of 19th-century medicine intersected.

John Scott Harrison’s odd place in presidential genealogy matters because it shows how rare true political dynasties are in the United States. In a country that likes to think of itself as allergic to hereditary power, he is the one man who literally connects two presidents by blood in both directions.

Peter Conover Hains: from Antietam to the Western Front

On a September morning in 1862, a teenage West Point cadet named Peter Conover Hains found himself in the bloodiest single day in American history. He served as a young officer in the Union Army at the Battle of Antietam. More than 20,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing by nightfall.

Hains survived. He stayed in the U.S. Army, became an engineer, and helped design lighthouses and coastal defenses. He fought again in the Spanish–American War in 1898. By any standard, that would have been a long, full military career.

Then came 1917. The United States entered World War I. Hains was in his seventies. He was recalled to active duty and given a stateside command. He did not storm trenches in France, but he wore the uniform, drew orders, and served in an official capacity.

That quirk of timing makes him, as far as historians can tell, the only person to be a veteran of both the American Civil War and World War I. There were other Civil War veterans still alive in 1917, but they were in their 70s, 80s, or 90s. Hains was unusual in being brought back into service.

His life tracks the arc of American military history from muzzle-loading rifles to machine guns, from railroads to tanks. He saw the United States move from a fractured republic to an industrial power sending troops across the Atlantic.

Peter Conover Hains matters because his career is a human bridge between two eras of war that usually feel separated by a century of technology and politics. His “only person in history” status is a reminder that for some individuals, history is not divided into neat periods. It is one long, continuous job.

Deion Sanders: the two-sport showman who broke the calendar

On a Sunday in October 1992, Deion Sanders played an NFL game for the Atlanta Falcons in Miami. That night he flew to Pittsburgh, where his baseball team, the Atlanta Braves, were in the National League Championship Series. The next day he was in uniform in a different sport, in a different city, in the middle of the playoffs. His agent called it the “Deion Double.”

Sanders was not just dabbling. He was a starting cornerback and return specialist in the NFL and an outfielder in Major League Baseball. He had world-class speed and a gift for self-promotion. He wore flashy suits, coined catchphrases, and irritated traditionalists in both sports.

Across that wild career, he did something no one else has done: he played in both the World Series and the Super Bowl. He appeared in the 1992 World Series with the Atlanta Braves, who lost to the Toronto Blue Jays. Later, he won Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers (Super Bowl XXIX, after the 1994 season) and the Dallas Cowboys (Super Bowl XXX, after the 1995 season).

(The Reddit post misremembers one detail. Sanders never played for the Toronto Blue Jays. He played against them. His World Series appearance came with the Braves.)

There are other impressive two-sport athletes. Bo Jackson made the Pro Bowl and the MLB All-Star Game. Brian Jordan played in the NFL and MLB. But the specific combination of reaching the championship series in both leagues is Sanders’s alone.

Deion Sanders’s uniqueness matters because it exposes how specialized modern elite sports have become. The reason no one else has done what he did is not that no one else is talented. It is that the calendars, contracts, and physical demands of the NFL and MLB now make this sort of crossover almost impossible.

Kathryn Sullivan: from spacewalk to the ocean’s floor

On October 11, 1984, Kathryn D. Sullivan stepped out of the space shuttle Challenger and into the vacuum. She became the first American woman to perform a spacewalk, clinging to the shuttle with a tether as the Earth rolled below her at 17,000 miles per hour.

She flew on three shuttle missions. She helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope. After leaving NASA, she became a geologist, an oceanographer, and later the head of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Then, in June 2020, she did something that tied her two worlds together. Sullivan joined an expedition in the deep-submergence vehicle Limiting Factor to the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. At nearly 11,000 meters below sea level, it is the deepest known point in Earth’s oceans.

That made her the only person in history to have both walked in space and visited the deepest part of the ocean. Others have done one or the other. A handful of people, starting with Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960, have reached the Challenger Deep. A few hundred have done spacewalks. Only Sullivan has done both.

Her career is a neat, almost cinematic arc from the edge of space to the bottom of the sea. It is also a story about how the same curiosity and technical skill can move between domains that seem completely different.

Kathryn Sullivan’s “only person” status matters because it links two frontiers that are often treated separately. It reminds us that exploration is not just about going higher or farther. It is about understanding an entire planet, from vacuum to abyss.

Philip Noel-Baker: the peace activist who ran for silver

On a summer day in Antwerp in 1920, a British runner named Philip Noel-Baker lined up for the men’s 1500 meters at the Olympic Games. He had already served as an officer and stretcher-bearer in World War I, where he was wounded and decorated. Now he was back on a track, trying to outrun the field.

Noel-Baker finished second. He took home a silver medal. For most athletes, that would be the peak of a life. For him, it was almost a preface.

After the war and the Olympics, Noel-Baker became a diplomat, academic, and politician. He worked on the founding of the League of Nations. He later sat in the British Parliament and became a leading voice for disarmament. In 1959, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to limit nuclear weapons and promote international cooperation.

That combination makes him, as far as records show, the only person in history to win both an Olympic medal and a Nobel Peace Prize. Others have bridged sports and politics. Imran Khan went from cricket to leading Pakistan. But no one else has that specific pairing of athletic and peace laurels.

Noel-Baker’s life cuts against the stereotype of the athlete as a narrow specialist. He moved from the track to the negotiating table, from physical endurance to political persistence.

Philip Noel-Baker matters because he is a reminder that the skill set for changing the world is not confined to one arena. His “only person” status is less about trivia and more about the rare person who can excel in two very different systems of honor.

Why these one-off lives fascinate us

Put these people side by side and a pattern appears. None of them are “only” because of a single superhuman act. They are “only” because of timing, longevity, and the way institutions hand out titles.

Jeanne Calment lived long enough, and in a country with good records, to be counted as the oldest verified human. John Scott Harrison was born into one political dynasty and fathered another in a system that usually resists dynasties. Peter Conover Hains stayed in uniform long enough to bridge two wars half a century apart. Deion Sanders squeezed two professional sports careers into the same calendar. Kathryn Sullivan rode two waves of exploration technology. Philip Noel-Baker moved from the battlefield and the track to the postwar peace movement.

There is also a quieter point. Every “only person in history” claim depends on what we choose to measure. We care about presidents, wars, Nobel Prizes, and major sports leagues. That is why these combinations are recorded and searchable. Somewhere in the past, there was probably a farmer who was the only person in history to survive a specific plague, win a local archery contest, and father triplets who all became monks. We will never know.

So what? Because these odd records are like pinholes in the big canvas of history. They let us peek at how systems, chance, and individual choices intersect. They remind us that history is not just about big events. It is about the strange, unrepeatable paths a few people walk through them.