Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The first elevator was built in 1743.

Louis XV had a 'flying chair' installed at Versailles so that he could reach his mistress's apartment a floor above; it was counterweighted and worked by men in a chimney. Elisha Otis's safety brake of 1852 made passenger lifts practical.

Answer: D

James Watt invented the rotary steam engine.

He did not invent the steam engine - Newcomen's was already at work - but added the separate condenser in 1765, which cut fuel use by three quarters, and then sun-and-planet gearing to turn the piston's motion into rotation, which took steam from pumping into manufacture.

Answer: C

It was the bikini.

Louis Reard introduced it in Paris in July 1946 and named it after Bikini Atoll, where an atomic test had been conducted four days earlier - he expected the garment to make a comparable explosion.

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.

Answer: B

Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine.

In 1796 he inoculated James Phipps with matter from a cowpox sore and then exposed him to smallpox, which he did not catch. The word vaccine comes from vacca, Latin for cow. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980.

Answer: A

The Raggedy Ann doll was patented in 1915.

Johnny Gruelle, a cartoonist, patented the rag doll with red yarn hair and named it after two poems by James Whitcomb Riley. The stories about her followed in 1918.

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

Barbed wire was patented in 1874.

Joseph Glidden of De Kalb, Illinois, patented the design that prevailed. Cheap fencing transformed the American West, ending the open range and the long cattle drives within a decade.

Answer: C

SPICE was introduced in the 1970s.

The Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis was released by the University of California, Berkeley in 1973 and put into the public domain. Every circuit simulator since descends from it.

Answer: A

Franklin invented bifocal spectacles.

Tired of changing between reading and distance glasses, he had the lenses of both cut in half and set together in one frame, describing the result in a letter of 1784.