Inventions Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Michael Faraday invented the electric generator.

His discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831 - that a changing magnetic field induces a current - led at once to the disc dynamo. Every power station since works on the principle.

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: A

Bartolomeo Cristofori invented it.

The keeper of instruments at the Medici court in Florence built the first piano about 1700, replacing the plucking quills of the harpsichord with hammers that struck and fell away. That let the player vary the loudness - hence the name gravicembalo col piano e forte.

Answer: B

After the Stock Market crash, a buying and selling game created by Charles Darrow came to be. The first games were hand drawn on linoleum with streets from Atlantic City, N.J. as the property. He took the game to the Parker Brothers company, and Monopply was brought out for Christmas 1934. Everyone wanted to buy the games after Christmas, and Monopoly became a big success.

Answer: B

Edwin Land invented the Polaroid camera.

His instant camera of 1948 developed the photograph inside itself in about a minute. He was prompted by his three-year-old daughter asking in 1943 why she could not see the picture at once.

Answer: A

J.J. Thomson discovered the electron.

In 1897 he showed that cathode rays are particles far lighter than any atom and identical whatever the gas or electrode used, so they must be a universal constituent of matter. He received the Nobel Prize in 1906.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Blaise Pascal

Pascal built the Pascaline in 1642, at the age of nineteen, to help his father with tax accounts. It could add and subtract directly, and Leibniz later extended the principle to multiplication with his stepped reckoner.

Answer: C

For the automatic telephone exchange.

Almon Strowger, an undertaker in Kansas City, believed the local operator was diverting calls to a rival, and in 1891 patented a switch that let callers reach a number without a human intermediary. The Strowger step-by-step switch served exchanges for eighty years.

Answer: A

He is remembered for computers.

Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine and then the Analytical Engine, which had a store, a mill, punched-card input and conditional branching - the essentials of a computer, a century before one was built. Neither was completed in his lifetime.

Answer: C

Rutherford discovered the proton.

He identified it in 1919 by bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles and detecting hydrogen nuclei - the first artificial transmutation. He had earlier discovered the nucleus itself, in 1911.