Inventions And Scientists Trivia Quiz

Position your cursor over the question mark found beside each question for the answer.


Born in Nice, France, what British physicist and chemist discovered that water is made up of "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen) and "phlogiston" (hydrogen)?

       a. Isaac Newton
       b. Humphrey Davy
       c. Henry Cavendish
       d. Michael Faraday


An "algorithm" was named for Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, an Arab scholar in what field?

       a. Anatomy
       b. Mathematics
       c. Philosophy
       d. Music


On March 10, 1876, what was the first complete sentence ever transmitted by telephone?

       a. Watson, come here. I want to see you.
       b. Testing, testing. One-two-three.
       c. What hath God wrought?
       d. Stop calling me. I don't want to change providers.


John Deere, who founded the company named for him, developed which of these inventions, which he first tested in 1837, on Lewis Crandall's farm near Grand Detour, Illinois?

       a. Steel plowshare
       b. Barbed wire fencing
       c. Electric lawnmower
       d. Automatic rifle


Christian Schonbein was playing with nitric and sulfuric acids in his wife's kitchen. He spilled some chemicals and used his wife's apron to clean up the mess. What happened when he tried to dry the apron out over her oven?

       a. It exploded
       b. It tasted good
       c. It became denim
       d. It could speak three languages


After accepting a 1938 Nobel Prize, what Italian fled to the US with his Jewish wife, rather than return to his increasingly anti-Semitic homeland?

       a. Giuseppe Verdi
       b. Guglielmo Marconi
       c. Enrico Fermi
       d. Umberto Eco


Surely you're joking! Who is shown playing bongos on the cover of a book of his physics lectures?

       a. Carl Sagan
       b. Richard Feynman
       c. Freeman Dyson
       d. Stephen Hawking


In 1851, Jean Foucault created a stir by hanging something from the dome of the Pantheon in Paris. What?

       a. A pendulum
       b. Jean Foucault
       c. A list of his demands
       d. A new lamp


What Paris-born German engine inventor mysteriously fell off a steamer en route to London in 1913?

       a. Rudolf Diesel
       b. Carl Benz
       c. Henry Bessemer
       d. Gottlieb Daimler


He discovered boron, figured out the anesthetic effects of laughing gas, proved that diamonds are made of carbon and invented the miner's lamp. Who was he?

       a. Thomas Edison
       b. Benjamin Franklin
       c. Humphry Davy
       d. Isaac Newton


Who compiled the first trigonometric table, discovered precession and compiled the first star catalogue?

       a. Hero of Alexandria
       b. Hipparchus
       c. Euclid
       d. Pythagoras


In 1862, what future inventor started publishing a weekly called the Grand Trunk Herald, which he printed from his own lab in one of the freight cars?

       a. Samuel Morse
       b. Thomas Edison
       c. Samuel Colt
       d. Eli Whitney


After Hitler came to power, Albert Einstein got a job at the Institute for Advanced Study and moved to what college town?

       a. South Bend, Indiana
       b. Palo Alto, California
       c. Princeton, New Jersey
       d. Cambridge, Massachusetts


After the Battle of Syracuse in the Second Punic War, as the story goes, a Roman soldier killed this catapult inventor after the latter complained that the soldier was disturbing his diagrams in the sand. Who was this famous Greek?

       a. Archimedes
       b. Pindar
       c. Pliny the Elder
       d. Diogenes


Expressing his objection to quantum physics, who said, "God does not play dice," to which Neils Bohr apparently replied, "Stop telling God what to do"?

       a. Albert Einstein
       b. Ernest Rutherford
       c. Isaac Newton
       d. Enrico Fermi




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