That makes sense. If they had been able to cast Patronus 2.0, this probably would have been recorded, even if the method for doing it remained a secret. This is in keeping with the oft-alluded-to tradition that it's okay to tell that somebody could do a magical feat, but sometimes it's not okay to tell people how.
Which leaves us with orthonormal's question again: why is Harry the first?
Someone like Flamel might not have tried to produce a Patronus after he'd begun work on the Philosopher's Stone, and others like Godric Gryffindor might not have had knowledge of the Philospher's Stone, or might not have approved of it. I think this is a plausible explanation.
Harry is the first because he's the first wizard to be familiar with transhumanist ideas. (Why, in the MoRverse, did such ideas not crop up before? Dunno. Maybe because the only forms of death-defying magic known to wizardry are things like Horcruxing that would only be done by the Bad Guys, so that the idea of defying death is seen as characteristic of Bad Guys. Maybe because wizards are (for good reasons) keen on tradition -- that is, after all, how they learn most of their spells, and it seems like new magical discoveries are much rarer than new scienti...
Update: This post has also been superseded - new comments belong in the latest thread.
The second thread has now also exceeded 500 comments, so after 42 chapters of MoR it's time for a new thread.
From the first thread: