Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: A

It was patented in 1794.

Philip Vaughan, a Welsh ironmaster, patented a design in which balls ran in a grooved track on a carriage axle - the first radial ball bearing. Leonardo had sketched the idea three centuries earlier.

Answer: A

Copernicus proposed it.

De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, published in 1543 as he lay dying, placed the sun rather than the earth at the centre. Galileo's telescopic observations later supplied the evidence, at considerable cost to himself.

Answer: B

William Ramsay discovered the inert gases.

With Lord Rayleigh he isolated argon in 1894, and then helium, neon, krypton and xenon - a whole new group of the periodic table. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904.

Answer: C

It goes back to the 1870s.

Students at Yale threw the empty pie tins of the Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, calling out the name as a warning. Walter Morrison made a plastic version in 1948, and Wham-O adopted the old name in 1958.

Answer: A

It was Robert H. Goddard.

He launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket in March 1926 and held 214 patents. Ridiculed by the press in 1920 for suggesting a rocket could reach the moon, he was vindicated when Apollo 11 landed; the newspaper printed a correction the day after the launch.

Answer: A

Johannes Gutenberg invented it.

At Mainz in the 1440s he combined movable metal type cast in a hand mould, oil-based ink and a screw press. His Bible of about 1455 was the first substantial European book printed with movable type.

Answer: D

It was 1929.

Fleming noticed in September 1928 that a stray mould had killed the staphylococci on a culture plate he had left out, and published the finding in 1929. It was not turned into a drug until Florey and Chain did so at Oxford in 1940.

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

Frederick Banting discovered insulin.

With Charles Best at Toronto in 1921 he extracted it from dog pancreas and showed it controlled diabetes. He shared the 1923 Nobel Prize with J.J.R. Macleod and gave half his share to Best; the patent was sold to the university for one dollar.

Answer: A

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.