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Sheeple tend to forget that the world's first known serial killer, Jack the Ripper, used a knife to kill 5 women in 1888 London. The Ripper caused so much public discomfort with his knife that it was followed all around the world in the newspapers.
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Jack the Ripper was not a mass murderer, but a serial killer, and he wasn't the first and wasn't the first known. Dr. Harry Howard Holmes preceded Jack by several years, killed more people, of which aphixiation of one of his favored methods.
Gilles de Rais (a French nobleman, born in 1404) preceded both of those by over 400 years. No doubt there were others, but these are serial killers and not mass killers - serial being a series of murders over time involving multiple incidents, mass being multiple victims in a singular event, although the event may occur over a period of time (as with Cho's, Whitman's, etc. sprees) as a continuous event.
The first reported mass murder I can find in the US is Howard Unruh in 1949 who did go on a shooting spree, but he was apparently just one of the earlier known single mass muderers. You then also have mass murder events like St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929 that was a mass murder committed by several individuals.