Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The most important feature is that it also comprises the President.

Article 79 states that the Parliament of India consists of the President and the two Houses. The President is not a member of either House but is part of Parliament: no Bill becomes law without assent, and Parliament cannot be summoned or prorogued except by the President.

Answer: D

Charles Macintosh invented it.

The Glasgow chemist found in 1823 that naphtha, a waste product of the gasworks, dissolved rubber, and sandwiched the solution between two layers of cloth. The waterproof coat still bears his name, with an added k.

Answer: A

Alfred Nobel patented it.

Nitroglycerine was too unstable to handle safely; in 1867 he found that absorbing it in kieselguhr made it manageable, and patented the result as dynamite. The fortune it earned endowed the Nobel Prizes.

Answer: C

Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick invented it.

The German ophthalmologist made the first contact lens in 1888, a heavy blown-glass shell that covered the whole eye and could be worn only for a few hours. Plastic corneal lenses came in the 1940s.

Answer: C

It was patented in 1874.

Joseph Glidden of Illinois patented the design that prevailed. Cheap fencing ended the open range in the American West within a decade, and with it the long cattle drives.

Answer: C

Correct answer: John Boyd Dunlop

The Scottish veterinary surgeon John Boyd Dunlop devised the first practical pneumatic tyre in 1888, for his son’s tricycle. Robert Thomson had patented the idea decades earlier, but it was Dunlop’s version that reached production.

Answer: C

Richard Trevithick built it.

His locomotive hauled ten tonnes of iron and seventy men along the Penydarren tramway in Wales on 21 February 1804 - the first steam engine to run on rails. George Stephenson built the first practical railway locomotive twenty years later.

Answer: A

It was Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

He proposed a hypertext system at CERN in 1989 and wrote the first browser and server the following year. He gave the technology away, and CERN placed it in the public domain in 1993.

Answer: C

Edwin H. Armstrong invented FM radio.

He demonstrated frequency modulation in 1933, which gave far better sound and immunity to the static that ruined AM reception in storms. RCA obstructed it for years, and Armstrong took his own life in 1954 in the middle of the litigation.

Answer: A

Bartolomeo Cristofori invented it.

The keeper of instruments at the Medici court in Florence built the first piano about 1700, replacing the plucking quills of the harpsichord with hammers that struck and fell away. That let the player vary the loudness - hence the name gravicembalo col piano e forte.