Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Frederick Banting discovered insulin.

With Charles Best at Toronto in 1921 he extracted it from dog pancreas and showed it controlled diabetes. He shared the 1923 Nobel Prize with J.J.R. Macleod and gave half his share to Best; the patent was sold to the university for one dollar.

Answer: B

Thomas Alva Edison.

He did not invent the idea of the electric lamp but produced the first commercially practical one in 1879, with a carbonised filament in a high vacuum that burned for over forty hours. Joseph Swan in England developed one independently at the same time.

Answer: A

Leonardo da Vinci first had the idea.

He sketched a pyramidal parachute of linen about 1485, noting that a man could throw himself down from any height without injury. A modern replica was built and successfully jumped in 2000.

Answer: D

All of these.

Galileo found that a pendulum's period does not depend on the size of its swing; discovered the four large moons of Jupiter in 1610, which showed not everything orbits the earth; and improved the telescope to twenty times magnification for astronomical use.

Answer: A

Ole Romer first measured it.

The Danish astronomer noticed in 1676 that the eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io ran late when the earth was farther from Jupiter, and inferred that light takes time to cross the distance. His figure was about 220,000 km/s - low, but the first demonstration that light has a finite speed.

Answer: D

Louis Pasteur invented it.

He developed the vaccine from dried spinal cord of infected rabbits and used it in 1885 on Joseph Meister, a boy bitten by a rabid dog, who survived. It was the first vaccine created in a laboratory rather than from a natural disease.

Answer: B

Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine.

His injected vaccine of 1955 used killed virus, and he refused to patent it, asking who could patent the sun. Albert Sabin's oral vaccine, using live attenuated virus, followed and is the one used in mass campaigns.

Answer: D

All of these are his.

Edison patented the phonograph in 1878, the carbon transmitter that made the telephone practical, and the first commercially viable incandescent lamp in 1879. He held 1,093 United States patents.

Answer: A

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck propounded it.

He held in 1809 that characters acquired in a lifetime - the giraffe's neck stretched by reaching - are passed to offspring. Weismann disproved it by cutting off the tails of mice for generations without effect, and Darwin's natural selection replaced it.

Answer: D

All of these.

Faraday discovered electromagnetic rotation and then induction, isolated benzene, liquefied several gases, and produced heavy optical glass. He had almost no formal education and refused a knighthood.