and fired the shot heard round the world.
The phrase originates in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn, 1837 and relates to the start of the American Revolutionary War: By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled; Here once the embattled farmers stood; And fired the shot heard 'round the world. On 19 April 1775, on Lexington Square (Lexington is between Boston and Concord), the British Major John Pitcairn and his six light Infantry companies faced about seventy colonial militiamen.