Static GK Quiz: Inventions and Inventors

Roentgen, a German physicist, noticed in 1895 that a screen in his darkened laboratory glowed while a covered discharge tube was running, and he named the unknown radiation X-rays.

In 1796 Jenner showed that material from a cowpox sore protected a boy against smallpox, the first deliberate vaccination, and the word vaccine itself comes from vacca, the Latin for cow.

Paul Hermann Muller is remembered for showing that DDT kills insects, work for which he received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; vitamin D is associated with Edward Mellanby, who linked its absence to rickets, and with Adolf Windaus, who worked out its chemistry.

Bell received the patent for the telephone in 1876 and made the first call over a wire, carrying the human voice itself rather than a code.

The Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patented dynamite in 1867, a safe way of handling nitroglycerine, and the fortune he made from explosives endowed the Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901.

Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mould of the genus Penicillium had killed the bacteria growing around it on a culture plate, and the substance he named penicillin became the first antibiotic; Florey and Chain later turned it into a usable drug and shared the Nobel Prize with him.

Chadwick showed in 1932 that the radiation given off when beryllium is struck by alpha particles consists of neutral particles of about the mass of a proton, and he named them neutrons; he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for it.

Working at the CERN laboratory in 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a system of linked documents and wrote the first web browser and server, giving the world HTML, HTTP and the address form known as the URL.

Babbage designed the difference engine and then the analytical engine, a mechanical machine with a store, a mill and punched card input, which carried every idea of a modern general purpose computer, and he is therefore called the father of the computer.

In 1643 the Italian scientist Torricelli filled a long glass tube with mercury and inverted it in a dish, and the column that stayed up showed that the air outside was pressing on the mercury; that apparatus is the mercury barometer, and the unit torr is named after him.