Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking that produced the first nuclear weapons.

Run by the United States with the United Kingdom and Canada during the Second World War, under General Leslie Groves with J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos laboratory, it produced the first atomic bomb, tested at Trinity in July 1945, and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was named after the Manhattan Engineer District of the US Army Corps of Engineers, not because it was a real estate venture, an art auction or a theme park in New York.

Answer: A

The Penny Post was the idea of Rowland Hill.

In his pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability (1837), the English teacher and reformer Rowland Hill argued for a single low rate of postage, paid in advance by the sender, whatever the distance. The Uniform Penny Post began in Britain in January 1840, and the Penny Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp, followed in May 1840. Cheap, fast letters transformed communication.

John McAdam devised the macadam road surface, George Stephenson built early railway locomotives such as the Rocket, and Samuel Morse developed the electric telegraph and Morse code. All improved communication or transport, but none devised the Penny Post.

Answer: A

Christopher Sholes devised it.

He arranged the keys of his 1873 typewriter so that letters often typed in succession sat far apart on the typebar basket, which stopped the bars from jamming. The layout survived the mechanism it was designed for.

Answer: D

He was Thomas Jefferson.

The third President invented a swivel chair, on which he is said to have drafted the Declaration of Independence, a spherical sundial, an improved mouldboard plough and a wheel cipher. He never patented anything, holding that ideas should be free.

Answer: A

The Wright brothers did.

Wilbur and Orville flew the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903, covering 37 m in twelve seconds. Others had flown before, but the Wrights were first to achieve controlled flight, through their system of wing-warping for roll.

Answer: A

IBM made it.

The IBM 610 Auto-Point Computer of 1957 was the first machine designed to be operated by one person at a keyboard. It cost $55,000 and was programmed by punched paper tape.

Answer: D

They were invented in the 1850s.

Levi Strauss was selling sturdy trousers to miners in California from 1853, and with the tailor Jacob Davis patented the use of copper rivets at the stress points in 1873. The rivets are what made them jeans rather than merely trousers.

Answer: D

It is the electric guitar.

George Beauchamp designed the Frying Pan in 1931 with Adolph Rickenbacker, using an electromagnetic pickup to sense the strings' vibration rather than a soundbox. Every electric guitar since works on that principle.

Answer: B

It was introduced publicly in 1990.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser and server at CERN in late 1990, and the Web was opened outside CERN in 1991. CERN placed the technology in the public domain in 1993.

Answer: B

George Inman invented it.

He led the General Electric team that produced the first practical fluorescent lamp in 1938. A discharge through mercury vapour emits ultraviolet, which a phosphor coating converts to visible light - three times as efficient as a filament lamp.