Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Simon Lake invented it.

The American submarine designer patented the periscope in 1902, using prisms and lenses in a tube so that a submerged submarine could see the surface. His Argonaut had been the first submarine to operate in the open sea.

Answer: C

Charles Goodyear invented vulcanised rubber.

He found in 1839, by accident, that rubber heated with sulphur became elastic over a wide range of temperature instead of melting in heat and cracking in cold. He died in debt, and the tyre company took his name long afterwards.

Answer: B

William G. Morgan invented it.

A YMCA physical director at Holyoke, Massachusetts, he devised it in 1895 as a gentler alternative to basketball for older members, and called it mintonette. It became an Olympic sport in 1964.

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: D

Christopher Latham Sholes invented it.

He patented the first practical typewriter in 1868 with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, and devised the QWERTY layout to keep frequently paired letters apart so that the typebars would not jam.

Answer: A

James Chadwick discovered the neutron.

In 1932 he bombarded beryllium with alpha particles and showed the penetrating radiation produced could knock protons out of paraffin - behaviour only a neutral particle of about the proton's mass could explain.

Answer: C

The yo-yo came from the Philippines.

It was a Filipino toy and possibly a hunting weapon; Pedro Flores brought it to the United States in the 1920s and began manufacturing there, and the word is Filipino. Similar toys are known from ancient Greece and China.

Answer: D

Jack Kilby invented it.

He built the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in September 1958, a phase-shift oscillator on a sliver of germanium, while most of the staff were away on holiday. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.

Answer: C

Roger Bacon is credited with it in Europe.

The English friar recorded a formula for gunpowder in 1267, in an anagram to keep it secret. The Chinese had made it some four centuries earlier, in the search for an elixir of immortality.

Answer: C

Michael Faraday invented the electric generator.

His discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831 - that a changing magnetic field induces a current - led at once to the disc dynamo. Every power station since works on the principle.