Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: B

It was 'Turnip' Townshend.

Charles Townshend, second Viscount Townshend, popularised the four-course Norfolk rotation of wheat, turnips, barley and clover in the 1730s. It ended the need to leave land fallow, since clover restored nitrogen and turnips fed cattle through winter.

Answer: C

Edward Asselbergs invented instant mashed potato.

The Canadian food scientist developed the dehydrated potato flake in 1962 while working for the Department of Agriculture at Ottawa. Solanum tuberosum is the potato's botanical name, and Walter Raleigh is credited with bringing it to Europe.

Answer: C

Anton van Leeuwenhoek is credited with it.

The Delft draper ground single lenses of extraordinary quality, reaching magnifications of about 270 times, and was the first to see bacteria, protozoa and spermatozoa. The compound microscope was the work of Janssen and Hooke.

Answer: D

It occurred in the 1900s.

Marconi transmitted the letter S in Morse across the Atlantic in December 1901, from Poldhu in Cornwall to Newfoundland. Reginald Fessenden made the first transatlantic voice broadcast in 1906.

Answer: C

Both Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs.

They designed Ethernet at Xerox PARC in 1973, borrowing the idea of listening before transmitting from the ALOHAnet radio network in Hawaii. Metcalfe named it after the luminiferous ether once thought to carry light.

Answer: D

Robert Watson-Watt invented radar.

Asked in 1935 whether radio waves could be used to destroy aircraft, he showed instead that they could detect them, and his Daventry experiment led to the Chain Home stations that gave Britain warning in 1940.

Answer: C

The receiver paid.

Postage was charged on delivery and by distance, so letters were often refused. Rowland Hill's reform of 1840 introduced the uniform Penny Post prepaid by the sender, with the Penny Black as evidence of payment.

Answer: B

It was the lava lamp.

Edward Craven Walker devised it after seeing an egg-timer made from a cocktail shaker of oily liquid on a stove in a Dorset pub. He called it the Astro Lamp, and it became an emblem of the 1960s.

Answer: C

The United States developed it.

The Manhattan Project tested the first device at Alamogordo on 16 July 1945, and bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month. The Soviet Union followed in 1949, Britain in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964 and India in 1974.

Answer: D

Thomas Alva Edison is credited with it.

He invented the phonograph in 1877, recording on tinfoil around a cylinder. Emile Berliner's gramophone of 1887 used a flat disc instead, which could be stamped in quantity and so became the standard.