Which insurance salesman invented the fountain pen in 1884?
Answer: A
Lewis Edson Waterman invented it.
The insurance salesman patented a fountain pen with a capillary feed in 1884, after - by his own account - a leaking pen ruined a contract he was about to have signed. The feed let air in as ink flowed out, which stopped the blotting.
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In 1902 an inventive Australian used half-size sheets of paper, glue and cardboard to create what?
Answer: A
He created the notepad.
J.A. Birchall, a stationer at Launceston in Tasmania, cut sheets in half, stacked them and glued one edge to a cardboard backing in 1902 - the first writing pad.
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Who invented Bifocal Lens?
Answer: C
Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens.
He had the lenses of his reading and distance glasses cut across and set together in a single frame, so that he could look down to read and up to see across the room. He described it in a letter of 1784.
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Which charge card, launched in 1950, was the first to be accepted nationally in the United States?
Answer: D
It was the Diners Club card.
Frank McNamara founded it in 1950 after finding himself without cash at a New York restaurant. It began with 200 members and fourteen restaurants, and was the first card accepted by many different merchants rather than a single store.
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Which now-ubiquitous device was invented by the Zenith engineer Eugene Polley in 1955?
Answer: B
It was the remote control.
Eugene Polley's Flash-Matic of 1955 shone a beam of light at photocells in the four corners of the television set. Sunlight could change the channel by accident, and Robert Adler's ultrasonic Space Command replaced it a year later.
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The Manhattan Project was begun by President Roosevelt in 1942 to build a nuclear bomb before Germany did. Whom did he appoint as its scientific head?
Answer: A
Robert Oppenheimer.
Roosevelt made him scientific director of the Los Alamos laboratory in 1942. General Leslie Groves ran the project overall, Vannevar Bush headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and James Conant chaired the committee that oversaw it.
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Who first found a practical method of freezing food?
Answer: A
Clarence Birdseye found it.
Working as a fur trader in Labrador, he saw fish frozen instantly in the Arctic air keep their taste and texture on thawing. He worked out that slow freezing forms large ice crystals that rupture the cells, and patented quick freezing in 1927.
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Who invented Gunpowder?
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.
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What type of system did Paul Nipkow, John Baird, and Charles Jenkins all invent?
Answer: D
They all worked on television.
Paul Nipkow patented the scanning disc in 1884, and John Logie Baird and Charles Jenkins used it in the 1920s to transmit the first moving pictures. Mechanical scanning was soon displaced by the all-electronic systems of Zworykin and Farnsworth.
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What inspired reflecting road lights to be invented?
Answer: B
It was the light a cat's eyes gave off on a fence.
Percy Shaw, driving on a foggy road in Yorkshire in 1933, saw his headlamps reflected in a cat's eyes and was saved from going off the road. He patented the reflecting road stud - still called cat's eyes - the next year.
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