Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Various authors have credited the invention of the thermometer to Cornelius Drebbel, Robert Fludd, Galileo Galilei or Santorio Santorio. The thermometer was not a single invention, however, but a development.
Galileo Galilei also discovered that objects (glass spheres filled with aqueous alcohol) of slightly different densities would rise and fall, which is nowadays the principle of the Galileo thermometer (shown). Today such thermometers are calibrated to a temperature scale.

Answer: D

It was Mosaic.

Released in 1993 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois, it displayed images alongside text in the same window and ran on ordinary personal computers. It was the browser that made the Web popular, and Netscape grew out of it.

Answer: D

Kirkpatrick Macmillan is credited with it.

The Scottish blacksmith is said to have added rear-driven treadles to a hobby-horse about 1839, making the first bicycle that could be ridden without the feet touching the ground. The claim rests on later testimony rather than a patent.

Answer: B

It became widely available in the 1950s.

Broadcasting had begun before the war but was suspended during it. Sets became affordable in the 1950s: the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 and the growth of American networks put television into most homes in the industrial countries within the decade.

Answer: C

Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens.

He had the lenses of his reading and distance glasses cut across and set together in a single frame, so that he could look down to read and up to see across the room. He described it in a letter of 1784.

Answer: D

It is the pH meter, invented by Arnold Beckman.

He built it in 1934 for a Californian citrus grower who needed to measure the acidity of lemon juice, using a vacuum-tube amplifier to read the tiny voltage from a glass electrode. It founded Beckman Instruments.

Answer: A

He is remembered for computers.

Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine and then the Analytical Engine, which had a store, a mill, punched-card input and conditional branching - the essentials of a computer, a century before one was built. Neither was completed in his lifetime.

Answer: A

Frank Whittle patented it first.

He filed his turbojet patent in January 1930 at the age of twenty-three. The Air Ministry showed no interest, and he could not afford the fee to renew it in 1935, which is why Hans von Ohain in Germany was able to patent independently.

Answer: B

It was invented in the 1840s.

Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail demonstrated the electric telegraph in 1844, sending 'What hath God wrought' from Washington to Baltimore. Cooke and Wheatstone had patented a version in England in 1837.

Answer: D

The parachute cost many lives in testing.

Early inventors jumped from towers and balloons to prove their designs. Franz Reichelt, a tailor, died in 1912 leaping from the Eiffel Tower in a wearable parachute of his own making, an attempt that was filmed.