Who was the first person credited with travelling to every country in existence at the time. The travels also should have been verifiable. Did Guinness records credit anyone with this? Travels not necessarily in one big go.
First Peron? Maybe Juan?
Or maybe this Wikipedia article can help us decide. It’s not clear cut. I’m not sure we can say definitively that anyone’s visited EVERY country yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_by_number_of_countries_visited
The notion of a country, a nation-state with specified borders, is much more modern than people understand.
People talk about the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War as setting up the system of sovereign nations in Europe. It turned out that’s what happened but it wasn’t specified in the language and may not have even been thought of that way. That was just a tiny corner of the world, though. Where were the countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas? Is a colony a nation? Is a claim to a territory a nation?
It’s probably not until well into 19th century or even the early 20th century, after the European imperialists divided the world into chunks, that the notion of a fixed country that could be visited even makes sense. A listing of nations in 1900 probably changed virtually every single year after that, as well, including this year and next year and the one after that.
Depending on how you define things, nobody has ever visited every “country.” The Travelers Century Club lists 325 countries & territories. That’s a goal that I don’t think anybody has ever reached.
Jtur88?
No, no. He says he’s been in every county, not every country! 
You beat me to it!
He seems to be well-travelled around the whole world too, judging from his posting history.
No matter how we define countries, we can probably agree that they did not all spring into existence simultaneously. One of them must have been established first. So the first person to travel to every country was probably someone who travelled to the first and only one.
And me!, and I was so happy to tout my man Juan Domingo’s travel record 
(Historical trivia, my mother and father both voted for him when he was elected president in 1974).
Technically he didn’t travel because he was already there. It would have to be to the second country. And more likely he traveled there to kill or subjugate them. :eek:
Nah, right after the first country was established, there would have been some trader or something who visited from elsewhere. Or maybe just some farmer who didn’t realize that his fields now straddled the border that some big hobnob had just established, and who came home from working the back 40.
I did say verifiable today. And a name.
Times when countries did not exist…
Who’s been everywhere, man?
People singing “I’ve Been Everywhere Man” that’s who.
That list is kind of bullshit however. They list “Turkey in Asia” and “Turkey in Europe” as two seperate items, lots of other duplications if you are interested in actual countries. According to the UN there are “only” 195 countries in the world.
According to the UN definition that wiki link above lists quite a few people that have visited all 195 + some other territories.
I came to basically say what Exapno said. For my first-year college students, I simplify matters by telling them that France was sort of the first state (country) in a modern sense, but England and Spain weren’t far behind, and China could make a case for being ahead of all of them.
So, no way to answer the OP. Maybe the question could be rephrased to something like: “Since the founding of the UN in 1945, has anyone visited all of its members (not including new later member states carved out of older ones; in other words, if someone visited Sudan in 1985, they wouldn’t have to go to South Sudan in 2005)?”
I see now that coremelt answered my proposed modification to the OP. There you go, then! Does that web link mention who did it first? Let’s see…
Okay, from that Wikipedia list, the two best answers to the OP seem to be:
Albert Podell, who apparently visited all UN countries before anyone else (1970s?)
Kashi Sammadar, who also did things like be in South Sudan on their Independence Day.