Who invented printing with movable type around 1450?
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Johannes Gutenberg
He made books affordable.
💡 Did you know? His method shaped Europe for centuries.
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Who developed wireless telegraphy (radio)?
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Guglielmo Marconi
He first sent signals across the Atlantic.
💡 Did you know? He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
Who invented dynamite and founded a famous prize?
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Alfred Nobel
He endowed the Nobel Prize with his fortune.
💡 Did you know? He wanted to be remembered for peace too.
Who invented the telegraph code of dots and dashes named after him?
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Samuel Morse
“SOS” is the best-known Morse signal.
💡 Did you know? The telegraph sent messages in an instant.
Who invented the World Wide Web around 1990?
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Tim Berners-Lee
He developed it at the CERN research centre.
💡 Did you know? He gave it to the world for free.
Who developed the theory of relativity?
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Albert Einstein
Einstein revolutionised the understanding of space, time and gravity. His formula E=mc² shows the equivalence of mass and energy.
💡 Did you know? He received the Nobel Prize not for relativity but for the photoelectric effect.
Who invented basketball in 1891?
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James Naismith
Gym teacher James Naismith wanted to keep students busy over winter and hung up a peach basket.
💡 Did you know? Naismith used a peach basket as the first 'hoop'.
Who discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, in 1928?
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Alexander Fleming
A mould on a culture dish led him to it.
💡 Did you know? Antibiotics have since saved millions of lives.
Which German physicist discovered penetrating rays named after him in 1895?
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Wilhelm Röntgen
He made the first X-ray: of his wife's hand.
💡 Did you know? He won the first Nobel Prize in Physics.
Which Frenchman developed the rabies vaccine and preservation by heating?
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Louis Pasteur
“Pasteurising” milk is named after him.
💡 Did you know? He disproved spontaneous generation.
Who turned the light bulb into a marketable product?
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Thomas Edison
He did not invent the principle alone: some twenty tinkerers worked on it. In 1879 Edison found a durable carbon filament and built the power grid to go with it.
💡 Did you know? The real breakthrough was not the lamp but the system: power station, wiring, meters and sockets. Without it nobody could have bought a bulb.
In which decade was the first mobile phone demonstrated in public?
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1970s
Cooper made the call on a New York street and rang his competitor at Bell Labs.
💡 Did you know? The device weighed 1.1 kilograms and lasted 30 minutes. Recharging took ten hours.
What was the first fully synthetic plastic, invented by Leo Baekeland in 1907?
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Bakelite
Baekeland pressed phenol and formaldehyde under heat; the result was hard, heat-resistant and an electrical insulator.
💡 Did you know? Bakelite went into telephones, radios and sockets. It was the first material that imitated nothing but was entirely new: the start of the plastic age.
Foto: AngMoKio · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Which building material made tall skyscrapers possible in the first place?
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steel
Before that the outer walls carried the building; beyond a certain height they would have had to be metres thick. A steel frame carries the load and the wall becomes a skin.
💡 Did you know? Just as important was Elisha Otis's safety lift: without it nobody would have moved willingly into the twentieth floor.
Who built the running machine of 1817, the ancestor of the bicycle?
Show answer
Karl Drais
The draisine had no pedals yet: you pushed yourself along with your feet.
💡 Did you know? One reason for the invention was a year of hunger: after the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 harvests failed, oats grew expensive and horses unaffordable. Drais was looking for a replacement.
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