Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Christiaan Eijkman found the cause.

Working in Java in 1897, he noticed that chickens fed polished rice developed a beri-beri-like illness that unpolished rice cured. The husk contained what was later identified as vitamin B1. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1929.

Answer: A

John Dalton devised it.

His atomic theory of 1808 held that elements consist of indivisible atoms, that all atoms of an element are identical in mass, and that compounds form in fixed whole-number ratios - which explained the laws of conservation of mass and of definite and multiple proportions at once.

Answer: D

It was 1929.

Fleming noticed in September 1928 that a stray mould had killed the staphylococci on a culture plate he had left out, and published the finding in 1929. It was not turned into a drug until Florey and Chain did so at Oxford in 1940.

Answer: A

Alexander Bain invented the fax machine.

The Scottish clockmaker patented it in 1843 - thirty years before the telephone. A pendulum with a stylus scanned a raised metal image line by line and reproduced it at the far end on chemically treated paper.

Answer: B

John Napier invented logarithms.

The Scottish laird published his tables in 1614 after twenty years of calculation, turning multiplication into addition. Laplace said they doubled the working life of an astronomer.

Answer: B

Thomas Edison is credited with it.

His laboratory built the kinetograph camera and the kinetoscope viewer between 1889 and 1892, though W.K.L. Dickson did most of the work. The Lumiere brothers' cinematograph of 1895 first projected film to an audience.

Answer: C

J.E. Lundstrom invented them.

Johan Edvard Lundstrom of Sweden patented the safety match in 1855, putting the red phosphorus on the striking surface of the box rather than in the match head, so that the match could not light by accident.

Answer: B

The United States government did.

ARPANET was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, and its first link was made in October 1969. The TCP/IP protocols that made it an internet were developed under the same funding in the 1970s.

Answer: C

David Bushnell invented it.

His Turtle of 1775 was a one-man wooden vessel shaped like an egg, hand-cranked, and intended to screw a charge into the hull of a British warship. It was the first submarine used in war, though its attack failed.

Answer: D

Rene Laennec invented the stethoscope.

In 1816, reluctant to put his ear to a young woman's chest, he rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and found the heart sounds clearer than before. He then made a wooden cylinder; the binaural form came later.