Biography from Current Biography (1985) 
(c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved. 

For more than half a century the research historian Joseph Nathan Kane has been tracking down elusive and obscure items in American history and presenting his findings in books, magazines, newspapers, over the airwaves, and on the lecture circuit. The most popular of his forty-six books is Famous First Facts, a monumental compilation of more than 9,000 miscellaneous first American happenings, discoveries, and inventions that has become a staple in reference collections everywhere. First published in 1933, that work is now in its fourth edition, and the octogenarian author continues to investigate new data for authenticity and possible inclusion in an expanded fifth edition. His next most widely consulted compendium is Facts About the Presidents (1959; fourth edition, 1981), offering a trove of information about the presidents of the United States and their terms in office and much about the office itself. During his long career Kane has served as a consultant to the radio, television, and motion-picture media and to corporations wanting certifiable information about "firsts" relating to their products or services. In the 1940s and 1950s he was the foremost authority for the questions asked on radio and television quiz shows, supplying all the questions for the long-lived Break the Bank and syndicating to many other programs. 

The oldest of three children, Joseph Nathan Kane was born at 12:15 p.m. on January 23, 1899 at 201 West 117th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side to Albert Norman Kane, an importer of furs, and Hulda (Ascheim) Kane. His maternal grandfather was a wholesaler of woolens and passementeries, and his paternal grandfather was a composer whose works were played by such bands as those of John Philip Sousa and Patrick Gilmore. Kane's brother, Albert, a former legal adviser in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, lives in Washington, D.C., and his sister, Ann, lives in West Palm Beach, Florida. 

Inheriting the paternal talent for music, Kane played the mandolin, violin, and banjo for his own amusement as a youth. He also collected stamps and foreign currency, and in school he was especially interested in world geography. He attended Public School 10, directly across the street from his parents' home on West 117th Street. That school, which no longer exists, numbered among its other illustrious graduates Bennett Cerf, the late publisher, Henry Dreyfus, the late industrial designer, Richard Rodgers, the late composer, and many jurists, including several high-court justices. Kane is secretary of P.S. 10's still active, although dwindling, alumni association. 

At Townsend Harris High School, then one of the elite New York City public secondary schools, now defunct, Kane constantly stymied his teachers with his demand for proof of their assertions. "At school I would ask, 'How do you know?'" he recalled in an interview for Current Biography. "And that was usually the end of the discussion." As editor of the Academic Herald at Townsend Harris, he interviewed John Wanamaker, the department-store mogul, among others, and later, for the Jewish press, he interviewed Vicente Blasco-Ibanez, the Spanish novelist and politician, Lord Balfour, the British statesman, H. G. Wells, the English novelist, and other prominent figures in politics, the arts, the sciences, music, and the theatre. Even then, he told the interviewer for Current Biography, he was trying to "shed light on facts generally unknown." 

At Columbia University from 1917 to 1920, Kane followed his own bent, taking classes in theatre and journalism but studying for the most part off the course and improving his knowledge of foreign languages. "I did not like to play follow-the-leader in education," he recalls. "If everyone was forced to read The Merchant of Venice, I would read Twelfth Night." Anticipating military service in World War I, he earned a certificate in electrical engineering from the Columbia School of Engineering in order to qualify as a radio and Morse-code operator. He enlisted in the army but never saw service, because he contracted influenza (from which he nearly died) during the great epidemic of 1918. 

After the war, Kane, responding to a classified newspaper advertisement, applied for a clerical position with D. Auerbach & Sons, New York City confectionery manufacturers. Because of his knowledge of world geography and currency and his ability to speak French, German, and Spanish as well as English, he was made manager of the company's export department. Following a year with D. Auerbach & Sons, he worked for two years as export manager of the Universal Export Corporation. 

While with D. Auerbach & Sons, Kane began writing monthly articles on export matters, including international finance, for the Confectioners Journal and Export Trade, and soon he was syndicating his articles to other trade journals, making revisions to suit the specific commodity interests of each. Over the following two decades he syndicated hundreds of articles to more than twenty publications, including Exporters' Digest and International Trade Review (of which he was an editor for several years), American Hatter, Underwear and Hosiery Review, Fur Age, Cracker Baker, National Costumer, and Playthings. He also contributed articles to such magazines and newspapers as American Hebrew, American Magazine, Advertising Age, Printers' Ink, Nation's Business and the New York Times, Sun, and World. As a State Department-accredited correspondent for his own Kane Feature News Syndicate, he covered, among other events, the 1921 Conference on the Limitation of Armaments in Washington, D.C.

As a free-lance, self-syndicated journalist, Kane between 1922 and 1932 spent eleven months of each year traveling around the United States. He visited every state in the union and most of the cities in each, traveling by rail, bus, his own car, and sometimes even by air. An aviation aficionado, he became acquainted with many pilots, including stunt pilots, and he wrote the column "The Back Seat Driver" for Aeronautical Industry and Air Transportation. 

Kane's career as a seeker of "firsts" dates back to his period of journalistic traveling in the 1920s. It began with an abortive commission from Simon & Schuster Inc. to write a popular history of inventions, the usual story of Morse and the telegraph, Edison and the electric light, Bell and the telephone, the Wright brothers and the airplane, and so forth. Planning the book on inventors in the generally accepted manner, Kane encountered many problems traditionally ignored by popular historians. One was a difficulty in terminology: an airplane is an aircraft, for example, but so is a balloon; similarly, automobiles used to be called motorcycles, and motorcycles used to be called automobiles. Among other problems were the simultaneity of several variations of the same invention; the difference between the actual invention and its refinement or development, manufacture, and promotion, leading to conflicts in claims; the inaccuracy or dishonesty of some claims; and the inadequacy of many of the records accepted as documentation for the claims. 

Kane came away from his initial research realizing that often "a lot of people" appeared responsible for the same invention and that "nobody knew who did it first." "The credit always seemed to go to the inventor with the best publicity agent," he recounted in an article he wrote for Liberty magazine (December 1938), "and the little man, too engrossed in his beloved work to advertise his exploits, was simply lost in the shuffle." 

Deciding to write a book on the achievers of "firsts" whom history had overlooked or forgotten, not only in invention but in general, Kane was told by librarians and other experts at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Historical Society, and elsewhere that such a definitive work could not be done, given the difficulty of establishing "firsts" with certainty. Their doubts only fired Kane's determination the more, while making him aware of the enormity of the task before him. He realized that every item in the book would have to be specific and exact as to full name, date, place, and description, backed by unassailable documentation and corroboration. Partly because he was "chauvinistic" and partly because available worldwide records were not commensurate with such a rigorous standard, he limited his scope to the United States, where he could find proof to substantiate his claims and not be bothered with "mostly unsubstantiated" counterclaims made by foreign countries for their nationals. 

Seeking out leads to and verification of interesting "first" facts, Kane in his travels gathered information from local people everywhere, including "achievers" or their descendants; frequented museums, used-book stores, historical societies, and libraries ranging from special collections and one-room rural libraries to the Library of Congress; pored over public documents and records, including patents, sales records, and newspaper files; and obtained data from government departments and private organizations and associations. Much of the information came to him by serendipity. Often consulting numerous sources and engaging in lengthy correspondence to establish a single fact from mounds of conflicting data, he bit by bit completed his book. 

Rejected by eleven other publishers, Kane finally approached the late Halsey W. Wilson, the founder and then president of the H. W. Wilson Company, with his manuscript. Wilson was hesitant, unsure that there would be a market for such a work. By mail or in person, Kane showed the manuscript, or photostated portions thereof, to reference librarians across the United States. Letters requesting the book poured into the H. W. Wilson Company, and on the strength of that demand Famous First Facts: A Record of First Happenings, Discoveries, and Inventions in the United States was published by Wilson in 1933. 

In his introduction to the first edition of Famous First Facts Kane pointed out that he was not attempting "to remold public conceptions, but merely to present impartial facts" and thus "to replace romantic history with commonplace truth." "Whenever rival claims have been put forth," he explained, "the one best substantiated has been given credence. Only those 'firsts' for which there are definite records are included; it is possible that further research into hitherto unpublished records may disclose additional data." 

The 757-page book cataloged some 3,000 facts (one third the number in the current edition), arranged alphabetically according to subject and indexed chronologically and geographically. Among the entries were such diverse items as the first distinctly American disease (tularemia, 1906); the first imported sheep (1609), cows (1624), and camels (1856); the first Afro-American army major (Martin Robinson Delaney, 1865); the first subway (the Beach Pneumatic Underground Railway, New York City, 1870); the first steamboat to carry a person (built by John Fitch in 1787, twenty years before Fulton introduced regular steamboat service); and the first lock-stitch sewing machine (made by Walter Hunt between 1832 and 1834, a dozen years before Elias Howe obtained his patent). 

Reviewers of the first edition of Famous First Facts hailed it as "something new under the sun," "a book more fascinating...than the dictionary" and "a very valuable tool for the reference library," and they marveled at the "patient plugging away at dry statistics" that must have gone into its creation. "It was surely a happy inspiration that set Joseph Nathan Kane at the task of producing so intriguing a volume," the reviewer for the New York Times (May 14, 1933) wrote, "and a dogged resolution of almost superhuman force that kept him at work so incessantly grilling until it was finished." 

Its supplement, More First Facts, was published by the H. W. Wilson Company in 1935. Only slightly slimmer than Famous First Facts, it presented an additional, entirely different collection of "firsts." The scope and general arrangement was the same as in the original volume, but a new feature was added, an index showing the various "firsts" occurring on each day of the year, including the material covered in the first volume. The second edition of Famous First Facts, published by Wilson fifteen years later, included, in revised form, the material in both the original volume and More First Facts as well as new entries. 

From August 1938 to July 1939 Kane hosted the weekly half-hour radio program Famous First Facts, broadcast coast to coast by the Mutual Broadcasting System. The program opened with a dramatization of a "first," followed by an interview with an achiever or an achiever's descendant. Among those interviewed by Kane were a nine-year-old descendant of John Hanson, who headed the first Continental Congress; Henry A. Walden, who built and flew the first monoplane in 1909; and the son of Charles E. Duryea, the builder of the first practical American gasoline automobile. 

In the heyday of radio and television quiz shows, Kane supplied some of the questions for The $64,000 Question and Double or Nothing, among other answer-for-money programs, and he wrote all of the questions for Break the Bank from the inception of that half-hour weekly show on the ABC radio network in 1945. In 1948-49 Break the Bank was simulcast on ABC television, and the following season it moved to the NBC television network, where it remained for five years, with the exception of one year on CBS. It returned to ABC for two-and-a-half years beginning in January 1954. During Break the Bank's first eight years the contestants, drawn from the studio audience, competed for sums in the magnitude of $10,000. Renamed Break the $250,000 Bank and featuring guest "experts" rather than studio contestants, the program ran on NBC from October 1956 to January 1957. 

In 1958 Kane wrote for the short-lived prime-time television quiz show Dotto. As recounted by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh in their Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows (1979) and by Alex McNeil in his Total Television (1980), the scandals that ended the popularity of the quiz shows had their origin in a daytime version of Dotto predating the nighttime program. They were precipitated by charges of rigging brought by a disgruntled would-be daytime contestant, one Edward Hilgemeier Jr. Kane, who supplied the questions and served as the authority for the correct answers but never participated in the production of any of the shows or met the contestants, later told a reporter that the rigging of quiz shows, where it existed, probably consisted of matching questions to contestants. "I know that Break the Bank...was principally on the up and up," he said. The quiz show scandals not only affected the television industry but ruined the salability of Kane's excellent little book How to Win on Quiz Shows (Bartholomew House, 1956). 

The H. W. Wilson Company published the first edition of Kane's Facts About the Presidents in 1959. "This torrent of factual matter is arranged systematically and is accompanied by a valuable index," Robert C. Woodward observed in his review in the Library Journal (January 1, 1960). "No more useful volume than this will come the way of reference workers during the forthcoming election year." The fourth and latest edition of Facts About the Presidents (Wilson, 1981) presents data concerning the lives, the backgrounds, and the terms in office of the thirty-nine men who have held the office of president of the United States, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Between editions, supplements are issued, bringing the reader up-to-date about the administration of the incumbent president. A supplement on the Reagan administration, for example, was published early in 1985. 

The most recent edition of Famous First Facts (Wilson, 1981) is a 1,350-page volume presenting more than 9,000 first discoveries, inventions, and happenings in American history, from the birth of the first child of European (Norse) parents on American soil in 1007 to the graduation of the first woman from West Point in 1980. In addition to the geographical and chronological indexes, there is a personal names index. Soft-cover editions of both Famous First Facts and Facts About the Presidents have been published by Pocket Books and Ace Books. Pocket Books also published Kane's Perma Quiz Book (1956) and The Second Perma Quiz Book (1958). Kane has adapted his fact research to journalism in several magazine and newspaper series, including "Accidentally Ours," in Coronet, "Who Was First," an illustrated daily feature syndicated to hundreds of newspapers by the NEA service, and "It Happened Here First," which ran in New York magazine beginning in 1977. 

Kane has also written 1,000 Facts Worth Knowing (Whitman, 1938); What Dog Is That? (Greenberg, 1944), containing descriptions of the 122 pure breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club, illustrated by Walter Edward Blythe; and The Centennial History of King Solomon Lodge No. 279, Free and Accepted Masons 1852-1952 (published by the lodge, to which Kane belongs, in 1952). The Scarecrow Press has published four editions of Kane's The American Counties, the latest in 1981. The same press issued Nicknames and Sobriquets of U.S. Cities and States (1970; revised, 1979), written by Kane in collaboration with Gerald L. Alexander. Kane has been a consultant to the American Foreign Credit Underwriters Corporation, and his expertise has often been tapped by television news departments, by Congress, by the White House, and by other governmental agencies, especially the Department of the Interior. 

Joseph Nathan Kane is five feet eight inches tall, white-haired, still somewhat wiry of physique, and brisk in his movements. His only noticeable physical failing is a hearing loss in his right ear. Because that defect diminishes his enjoyment of stage productions, he seldom goes to the theatre anymore, preferring motion pictures. (He does not watch television.) Kane has a constant sense of humor and likes to tell jokes and droll stories, which he delivers with a poker face. A seasoned world traveler, he has a smattering of many languages, and he retains his ability to speak Spanish, French, and German quite well. Periodically, he vacations at an isolated spa in Mexico where there is no television, radio, telephone, or even telegraph and where only fruits, nuts, and vegetables are served. (Normally he is not a vegetarian.) Most of his time is spent in his apartment or in libraries or other places of research because he is, as he says, "a workaholic." When he speaks before conventions of librarians or other groups he delivers not lectures but what he calls "rambles," during which the audience is invited to interrupt him at any time with questions. 

A childless widower, Kane maintains bachelor quarters in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Hudson River on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a few blocks southwest of his birthplace. The apartment is cluttered, in a workmanlike way, with books, index files, and cartons of newspaper clippings, photostats of documents and other source material, and recordings of the radio show he hosted in the late 1930s, two of which he played for the Current Biography interviewer on a vintage phonograph. He told the interviewer of two collections he keeps in his bank safe deposit box. One is his stamp collection. The other is a collection of curious old inventions, with patent tags. Among the inventions are the first safety pin, the first fountain pen, a paper collar, and a shoe with a revolving heel (to compensate for wear), all invented by Kane's hero, Walter Hunt. 

Although Kane calls himself a Reform Jew, he does not attend synagogue except to please his brother when he is in Washington. A skeptic who describes himself as a "factualist," a "fatalist," and a "universalist," he belongs to no political party and believes that "the world would be a better place" without parties, nationalities, churches, and color lines. On one wall of his apartment is a placard reading, "The person with a new idea is a crackpot--until it succeeds." Another favorite motto of his is Seneca's "Veritas simplex oratio est": Simple truth is the most eloquent oratory. 

Selected Biographical References: Cleveland Plain Dealer E p4 Jl 31 '85 por; Liberty p42+ D '38 pors; N Y Daily News p7 Ag 26 '76 por; Palm Beach Daily News p5 Je 16 '85 por, C p2 Ja 21 '83 por; Who's Who in America Monthly Supplement No. 9, 1943