---
title: "Which came first, Facebook or pizza?"
description: "Facebook vs pizza: pizza came first, by 224 years — 1780 against 2004. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/facebook-vs-pizza/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Facebook or pizza?

**Which came first, Facebook or pizza?: pizza**

1780 — 224 years before Facebook

pizza came first, by 224 years. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

## Side by side

|  | Facebook | pizza |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2004 | 1780 |
| Date | 2004-02-04 | — |
| Category | technology | food |
| What happened | TheFacebook launched for Harvard students only. | Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples. |

## Facebook

Facebook launched on 4 February 2004 restricted to Harvard email addresses, opened to other universities through 2004 and 2005, and to anyone over 13 with an email address in September 2006. It is six years younger than Google and a year older than YouTube. Its predecessor Facemash, which compared students' photographs, was shut down by the university within days in 2003.

## pizza

Flatbreads with toppings are ancient, but pizza in the sense people mean — wheat base, tomato, baked in a wood oven — dates from Naples in the late 1700s, and could not have existed earlier because tomatoes only reached Europe from the Americas in the 16th century and were widely thought poisonous for two hundred years. The Margherita story, in which a Naples pizzaiolo created a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889, rests on a single document now widely believed to be a forgery. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi's in New York, was licensed in 1905.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Facebook or pizza?

pizza, by 224 years — 1780 against 2004.

### When did Facebook start?

2004. TheFacebook launched for Harvard students only.

### When did pizza start?

1780. Tomato-topped flatbread was being sold in Naples.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]
- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place (/about/)