This phrase was coined by the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and used in his Concord Hymn. Emerson wrote this poem for the dedication in 1837 of a monument to commemorate the Battle of Concord, which was one of a number of skirmishes that marked the beginning of the American War of Independence. The poem describes a particular action in the build–up to the battle, but no one actually knows the exact circumstances in which the first shot was fired. The words simply express a romantic notion of an unheralded action that would set off a momentous chain of events.
Nor does any one seem to know who first used the same phrase to refer to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand. But even American sources agree that the words now apply as much to the later event as to the original.
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