Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Samuel Morse invented the telegraph.

He built a working electric telegraph with Alfred Vail and devised the code that bears his name, sending 'What hath God wrought' from Washington to Baltimore in 1844.

Answer: A

Leonardo da Vinci designed it.

His notebooks of the 1480s contain designs for a glider with a rigid wing and a hanging pilot. Otto Lilienthal made the first practical hang gliders in the 1890s, and Francis Rogallo's flexible wing of 1948 produced the modern form.

Answer: B

Kellogg made them first.

John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will created the flake at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1894, by accident, when they left boiled wheat to stand and then rolled it. Corn flakes followed, and Will founded the company in 1906.

Answer: A

It was discovered in 1938.

Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found barium among the products of neutron-bombarded uranium in December 1938. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch explained it as the nucleus splitting, and gave the process its name.

Answer: B

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: A

They were invented in Tang dynasty China.

The earliest reference is to a princess of the Tang court playing a leaf game in 868. Cards reached Europe by the 1370s, probably through Egypt, and acquired their present suits in France about 1480.

Answer: A

Elisha G. Otis invented it.

His device of 1852 used a wagon spring that engaged ratchets on the guide rails the moment rope tension was lost. He demonstrated it at the New York Crystal Palace in 1854 by having the rope cut while standing on the platform.

Answer: D

Garrett Augustus Morgan invented it.

The African-American inventor patented a three-position traffic signal in 1923, adding a warning interval between stop and go so that traffic could clear the junction. He sold the patent to General Electric for $40,000. He also invented a smoke hood used by firemen.

Answer: B

Kirkpatrick Macmillan is credited with it.

The Scottish blacksmith is said to have added rear-driven treadles to a hobby-horse about 1839, making the first bicycle propelled without the feet touching the ground.

Answer: C

J.E. Lundstrom invented them.

He patented the safety match in Sweden in 1855, separating the red phosphorus onto the striking surface. Earlier matches used white phosphorus, which caused the jaw disease called phossy jaw among factory workers.