Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Elisha Otis made the lift practical.

Hoists already existed but were unsafe if the rope broke. His safety brake of 1852 gripped the guide rails the instant tension was lost, and he demonstrated it in 1854 by having the rope cut while he stood on the platform.

Answer: D

They are associated with chloroform.

James Young Simpson introduced it as an anaesthetic in 1847 after trying it on himself and his assistants at dinner. John Snow administered it to Queen Victoria in 1853, which made it respectable.

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: A

Elias Howe invented the sewing machine.

He patented the lockstitch machine in 1846, with the eye of the needle at its point and a shuttle carrying a second thread beneath. Isaac Singer built a more usable machine and was successfully sued by Howe for infringement.

Answer: B

Louis Braille invented it.

Blinded at three by an accident in his father's workshop, he adapted a military night-writing code and by 1824, aged fifteen, had devised the six-dot cell that bears his name. It was not adopted in his own school until after his death.

Answer: C

Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium.

They isolated it from pitchblende in 1898, along with polonium, processing tonnes of ore for a fraction of a gram. Marie received the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it.

Answer: C

John Boyd Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre.

The veterinary surgeon made it in Belfast in 1888 for his son's tricycle. Robert Thomson had patented the same idea in 1845, but it had been forgotten, and Dunlop's patent was later held invalid on that ground.

Answer: C

Selman Waksman discovered streptomycin.

He and his student Albert Schatz isolated it from a soil actinomycete in 1943; it was the first effective treatment for tuberculosis. Waksman coined the word antibiotic and received the Nobel Prize in 1952.

Answer: B

Helium was found there first.

Pierre Janssen and Norman Lockyer saw an unexplained yellow line in the solar chromosphere during the eclipse of 1868. Lockyer named the element after helios, the sun; it was not found on earth until 1895.

Answer: C

Enrico Fermi built the first one.

Chicago Pile-1, a stack of graphite blocks and uranium, went critical on 2 December 1942 under the stands of the university's squash court - the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.