What is the etymology of "first crack"
Solution 1:
Crack: ( from dictionary.reference.com)
- A try; attempt; shot: It looks impossible, but I'll take a crack at it (1836+)
Have a crack at: ( The American Heritage Idioms Dictionary)
Also, get or have a go or shot or whack at ; take a crack at. Make an attempt or have a turn at doing something.
For example, Let me have a crack at assembling it, or I had a shot at it but failed, or Dad thinks he can—let him have a go at it, or Dave had a whack at changing the tire, or Jane wants to take a crack at it.
The oldest of these colloquialisms is have a shot at, alluding to firing a gun and first recorded in 1756; crack and go date from the 1830s, and whack from the late 1800s.
"What is the origin of "first crack out of the box"?" (from The Phrase Finder)
I found a meaning and similar phrases:
First crack off the bat... First crack/cat out of the box... First dash/pop/rattle out of the box.
They all are 20th century phrases and mean: immediately, at the first attempt.
From "Cassell's Dictionary of Slang" by Jonathon Green (Wellington House, London, 1998).
The phrase appears in Chapter 31 of Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1922. It also pops up all over the internet in a google search, throughout the English-speaking world.
- Again, I found all these expressions in a reference but it doesn't say what the origin is. It has 1909 as the earliest citation. It also has "first shot out of the box." The reference says "first rattle out of the box" is a cowboy's expression meaning "prompt action." From "Dictionary of American Regional English," Volume II by Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall (1991, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England).
- Could it be a rodeo term?
It seems to me that it might be an amalgamation of two similar cliches; "first crack" meaning "first attempt", and "right out of the box" meaning "from the beginning". "Right out of the box", in addition to the obvious indication of opening a new purchase or gift, has strong baseball associations. A baseball batter must stand in one of two designated chalk-outlined areas called the "batter's box". All base running starts from this box. A runner who can run to first base quickly will often be spoken of as "fast out of the box".
The cowboy/rodeo usage would certainly reinforce the "from the beginning" meaning, but baseball slang is much better known in the USA than rodeo jargon.
Solution 2:
Here is one subsection of a much longer entry for crack in J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994):
7.a. an attempt or opportunity; in phr[ase] first crack out of the box the very first opportunity. Now colloq. [The phrase get a crack at was orig. colloq. or S[tandard] E[nglish] and ref[erred] to 'getting a shot at (a game animal)', as in 1844 quot.]
[1844 Spirit of the Times (Feb. 3) 583: Get a crack at him.]
Of course, this entry raises the question of how "out of the box" became associated with "first crack" if that term came from an older association with firing a gun.
Findings from Library of Congress and Google Books search results
The earliest occurrence of the phrase "first crack out of the box" in the Library of Congress's newspaper archive is from 1884, and the next-earliest is from 1889, although 36 additional instances follow in the 1890s. The first Google Books matches for the phrase are from 1900.
From "North Shore Notes" in the Devils Lake [Dakota Territory] Inter-Ocean (December 6, 1884):
The sporting fraternity will find in the jim crack department of Hunter & Bennett's the celebrated and only original "first crack out of the box."
The fact that "first crack out of the box" appears in quotation marks here suggests that it is already (in 1884) a recognized idiom or set phrase in the Dakotas; the choice of the phrase is clearly tied to the pun involving "jim crack [gimcrack department," so it's hard to say what precisely the writer has in mind with regard to the longer phrase.
From "A Rough and Tumble Contest" in the Omaha [Nebraska] Daily Bee (December 18, 1889):
Another good crowd witnessed the championship polo game at the Coliseum last evening. The contest was between the S. P. Morse's and the Continentals, and was a savage rough-and-tumble fight from the first crack out of the box until Referee Rockwell sounded his fog horn announcing that the strife was at an end.
It is not clear whether the "first crack out of the box" here refers to something specific to polo or other pony sports or to something more general. The instances of the phrase from the 1890s in the Library of Congress search results appear in a wide range of situations involving sports contests, horse racing, politics, and business. One intriguing feature of the results from the 1880s and 1890s is how many (almost two-thirds) of them come from the Great Plains region of the United States: Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, Montana, and Minnesota.
But also intriguing is the narrow usage of the phrase "first crack out of the box" in New York City newspapers (six instances total, between 1893 and 1898), where it appears exclusively in the context of horse racing and refers variously to a horse's or rider's first race or to the beginning of a race. It may (or may not) be pertinent that, according to Lighter, one early meaning of crack is "an exceptionally fast racehorse; a favorite." This meaning goes back to 1637 by OED's reckoning and remained in use as recently as 1963.
The trouble is that the early instances from the Great Plains seem to be not nearly as focused on sports (and horses) as the New York instances are. Though it might be tempting to associate the "crack" with a speedy horse or the starter's pistol and the "box" with the starting gate, the chronology of the examples dos not favor such interpretations.
Occurrences of "first crack at," meanwhile, go back at least as far as 1841. From a review of John Mills, The Old English Gentleman, in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine (December 1841):
"Well, Peter," said the squire, "are all things prepared for our first crack at the pheasants to-morrow?"
And by 1848, the phrase was already being used metaphorically. From James Knight, The Life of Dr. Richard Jennings, the Great Victimizer (1848):
I also visited the gambling rooms of the place, which were not a few, with the intention of ascertaining who had the most money to bet, or what “green one” they were towing along, that they might eventually make a big haul, determining that, if possible, I would contrive to get the first crack at such myself.
So it appears that "first crack at" antedates "first crack out of the box" by several decades at least. As for the "out of the box" component of the latter phrase, I haven't been able to find any definitive explanation of its meaning.