Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Richard Gurley Drew invented it.

Working for 3M, he made masking tape in 1925 for car painters doing two-tone jobs, and transparent Scotch tape in 1930. The nickname is said to come from a painter's complaint that the firm's Scotch bosses had been too sparing with the adhesive.

Answer: B

Joseph Priestley discovered it independently.

He isolated the gas in 1774 by heating mercuric oxide with a burning glass, and called it dephlogisticated air. Carl Wilhelm Scheele had prepared it earlier but published later; Lavoisier named it oxygen and explained what it was.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Elias Howe

Elias Howe patented his lockstitch sewing machine in 1846, using a needle with the eye at the point. Isaac Singer built a more commercially successful machine soon after, and the resulting patent dispute was settled by a pooling arrangement.

Answer: D

Rudolf Diesel invented it.

He patented the compression-ignition engine in 1892 and had a working model by 1897. Compressing air alone to a high ratio raises its temperature enough to ignite injected fuel, so no spark is needed - which is why it is more efficient than a petrol engine.

Answer: C

They were made for Louis XIV.

The king, who was short, had heels made for himself and decreed that only nobles might wear red ones. Heels had earlier been worn by Persian cavalry to hold the foot in the stirrup.

Answer: A

Charles Babbage designed it.

The Analytical Engine, conceived from 1837, had a store, a mill, punched-card input and conditional branching - the essentials of a computer. Ada Lovelace wrote what is generally called the first computer program for it.

Answer: A

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.

Answer: D

Marie Curie discovered radium.

She and Pierre isolated it from pitchblende in 1898, along with polonium, having processed tonnes of ore to obtain a fraction of a gram. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it.

Answer: D

Samuel Morse introduced it.

With Alfred Vail he devised the code of dots and dashes for the electric telegraph, assigning the shortest signals to the commonest letters - a dot for E, a dash for T - by counting the type in a printer's case.

Answer: C

Konrad Zuse built it.

His Z3, completed at Berlin in 1941, used electromagnetic relays and read its program from punched film. It was the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer, and was destroyed in an air raid in 1943.