Quiz

Published March 2, 2013

Inventors and scientist

1.    He is the only US president to invent and patent something? 2.    He was the first US ambassador, first political cartoonist, the inventor of the lightning rod, bifocal lenses, discovered the Gulf Stream, and started the first library and the first fire department and much more. Who was it? 3.    He was another of the early US presidents as well as a scholar and inventor. He is credited with the invention of the swivel chair, the spherical sundial and the cipher wheel. Who was he? 4.    Alfred Nobel, the Swedish scientist, is the creator of the Nobel Prize and he also invented something in 1867 that earned him a lot of fame and money, but he was quite horrified with the use his invention was put to. What did he invent? 5.    In 1803, who put forward the theory that all substances are composed of small, dense, indestructible particles known as atoms? 6.    In 1932, this scientist discovered the neutron, a subatomic particle that has mass but no charge, name him. 7.    Name the German physicist who discovered the X-ray and was the first to get a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901. 8.    This scientist discovered penicillin when he noticed a mould that contaminated his bacterial implants on laboratory Petri dishes inhibited the growth of the organisms. He received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 1945. Name him. 9.    Born in 1900, this seismologist invented the scale used to measure the magnitude of earthquakes, name him. 10.    Name this man who invented both the carburettor and the motorcycle? Answers: 1.    Abraham Lincoln, in 1849, invented a forklift to aid ships that got stuck on sandbars. He called it ‘A device for buoying vessels over shoals’. However, wasn’t put to much use. 2.    Benjamin Franklin. 3.    Thomas Jefferson, the third US president. 4.    Dynamite. 5. John Dalton 6. James Chadwick 7. Wilhelm Roentgen 8. Sir Alexander Fleming 9. Charles Richter, and the scale is named after him. 10. Gottlieb Daimler — the carburettor was invented in 1876 and the motorcycle in 1885.

— Rehan Jalal

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