Who invented fuel cells in 1839?
Answer: B
Sir William Grove invented the fuel cell.
The Welsh judge and scientist showed in 1839 that combining hydrogen and oxygen over platinum electrodes produced electricity and water - the reverse of electrolysis. He called it a gas battery.
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Toricelli invented
Answer: A
Torricelli invented the barometer.
In 1643 he filled a metre-long tube with mercury and inverted it in a dish; the column fell to about 76 cm, held there by the weight of the atmosphere, leaving a vacuum above - the first sustained vacuum ever produced.
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The initials JCB on earth-moving equipment are those of the founder of the company that makes it. What is his name?
Answer: B
He was Joseph Cyril Bamford.
He founded the firm in a lock-up garage at Uttoxeter in 1945, making a tipping trailer from war-surplus steel. JCB went on to invent the backhoe loader, whose shape is now what most people mean by a digger.
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What drink was invented by Charles Leiper Grigg in 1929?
Answer: A
It was 7-Up.
Charles Leiper Grigg launched it in 1929 as Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda, which contained lithium citrate. The name was shortened, and the lithium was removed in 1948.
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Who built the first steam locomotive to run on rails?
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.
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What treat was invented by 11-year-old Frank Epperson in 1905?
Answer: A
It was the popsicle.
Frank Epperson left a cup of powdered soda and water with a stirring stick on a porch overnight in 1905; it froze, and he found he could pull it out by the stick. He patented it eighteen years later as the Epsicle.
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Where were wigs first invented?
Answer: C
Wigs were first used in Egypt.
Egyptians shaved their heads against lice and the heat and wore wigs of human hair or plant fibre, both for protection from the sun and as a mark of rank. The practice goes back to about 2700 BC.
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What plaything was invented by Joe McVicker in 1956?
Answer: D
It was Play-Doh.
Joe McVicker's family firm made a putty for cleaning coal soot off wallpaper. When oil heating made that trade obsolete, a schoolteacher relation suggested selling the compound as a modelling material for children.
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Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod and the Franklin stove, studied electricity, charted the Gulf Stream and founded the first lending library. Which musical instrument did he also invent?
Answer: D
He invented the glass armonica.
Franklin devised it in 1761 after hearing music played on wine glasses. A row of nested glass bowls on a spindle is turned by a treadle while the player touches the rims with wet fingers. Mozart and Beethoven both wrote for it.
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The first practical photographic process, the daguerreotype, was developed by ________.
Answer: C
Correct answer: Louis Daguerre
Daguerre announced his process in 1839, producing a sharp image on a silvered copper plate. It had no negative, so each picture was unique, and Talbot’s rival calotype, which did use a negative, is the ancestor of later photography.
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