Putting Inventions in Order Trivia Quiz

While wearable eyeglasses were only devised in the thirteenth century, members of some earlier civilizations had used hand-held lenses made of jewels or other materials to aid eyesight. For instance, in the eighth century BC in Egypt and Mesopotamia, polished quartz crystals had been used to look through and in the first century AD the Roman Emperor Nero was reported to have used an emerald as a lens.

In the eleventh century the Persian Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham suggested that a glass sphere might be used to magnify objects. Coincidentally or not, a variation of this idea was later used in Italy when what seems agreed to have been the first practical, wearable eyeglasses containing two glass lenses were invented.

Although accounts can vary slightly, Salvino D'Armate is recorded as producing the first, or one of the first, pairs of these eyeglasses in 1284. Glass lenses, ground to different strengths according to someone's vision needs, were set into frames which were riveted together. The frames could be attached to a handle and held up before the face or worn balanced on the nose.

Use of these eyeglasses quickly spread across Europe and later ribbons or strings were attached to them and tied round the ears. In 1730 a London optician called Edward Scarlett devised hinged rigid temples (short stiff side pieces) for the eyeglasses which went around the ears more firmly and this is still the basic design used today.

Printing on paper began in China in about 800 AD when a method used for adding designs to textiles was adapted to print words onto paper. Called woodblock printing, this method involved a block of characters being carved from wood, inked then pressed by hand onto paper so that the block's image was transferred onto the paper. A page could then be replicated any number of times, whereas before each copy of a page had to be individually written out by hand.

In the eleventh century, in China, Bi Sheng invented moveable type, which involved individual characters being carved from clay (and later from wood and metal). The characters could be assembled to form a page of script, which was printed onto paper in the same manual way as before. After the printing of a page, the same characters could then be re-assembled or moved to form a new page.

A major innovation in printing took place in Germany in the fifteenth century when Johannes Gutenberg invented a mechanical printing press. This machine still employed inked movable pieces of type but transferred ink from a block of this type onto paper mechanically. To do this, Gutenberg adapted a screw-threaded spiral mechanism from other equipment to use in his printing press. Turning a handle on the machine caused the paper to be pressed down onto a block of movable type mounted on a platen. In 1450 the first book Gutenberg printed on his press was what became known as the Gutenberg Bible.

Other European printers adopted his invention with, for example, William Caxton establishing the first printing press in England in 1476. As previous innovations had, Gutenberg's printing press speeded up the process of creating books and other printed matter. Because it so greatly increased the number of books available to the public, the mechanised, moveable type printing press has been credited with facilitating the spread of new ideas during the Renaissance period in Europe.

The word 'pencil' is derived from 'pencillus', the Latin word for a fine-tipped brush used for writing in ancient Rome. Over the ages, other methods of writing included using a stylus or a thin metal or lead rod and, by the Middle Ages, pieces of lead were also used in Europe for drawing.

Graphite began to replace lead in the sixteenth century after the discovery by shepherds of large amounts of pure graphite near Keswick in the English Lake District in 1564/5. They used the graphite to mark sheep but the substance was quickly adopted for writing on paper, with rods of it wrapped in bound paper or twigs being used, for instance by people in London, by the end of the century. Among its advantages over lead, graphite was erasable, produced darker marks and needed less pressure to produce the marks.

In Europe this crude pencil was gradually developed into one more like that currently in use. The graphite rods began being encased in either one piece, or two glued-together pieces, of hollowed-out wood, possibly first in Italy. In 1662 such pencils began being mass-produced in Nuremberg in Germany, in which country the use of powdered graphite mixed with sulphur and antimony was also experimented with.

In the 1790s two people separately began the manufacture of pencils by creating rods from a heated mixture of powdered graphite, clay and water then encasing the rods in wood. The Austrian Joseph Hardtmuth began producing these pencils in 1792 and, apparently coincidentally, the Frenchman Nicolas-Jacques Conté began production in about 1795. It was found that varying the ratio of the mixture enabled the hardness of the rod to be adjusted and this technique formed the basis of our current pencils, although the term 'lead pencils' continues to be used for them.

The Greek polymath Aristotle recorded that some troops of the Macedonian leader Alexander the Great used submersibles - possibly small diving bells - against a Persian enemy in 332 BC. However, it was only in the early sixteenth century that a larger boat which could move independently underwater was designed by Leonardo DaVinci. His proposed boat was not constructed though and some decades later, in 1578, William Bourne, an English mathematician, proposed an enclosed boat called a 'submarine' that could be rowed underwater. This would consist of a wooden framework covered with waterproof greased leather and would submerge when its sides were contracted to reduce its volume.

Bourne did not build this boat but his idea was taken up and extended by a Dutch inventor called Cornelis Drebbel who was living in England. The boat Drebbel invented was reinforced with iron and propelled by 12 oarsmen using oars that emerged through flexible leather seals in the boat's frame. The rowers breathed through air tubes reaching up above the water's surface so the submarine could stay underwater for some hours. The boat submerged when large pigskin bladders connected by pipes to the outside were allowed to fill with water and it rose again when the bladders were forced to empty.

Drebbel's submarine was able to descend to fifteen feet under the surface and was first demonstrated on the River Thames in England in 1620. Drebbel constructed a second submarine and two successful demonstrations of this were given on the River Thames with the second one taking place in 1624 in front of the then king, James I, and thousands of people. Despite these successful tests, the navy, for whom Drebbel was apparently constructing it, did not commission the submarine.

It was not until early the next century that other fully working submarines were built. One of these was what has been generally described as the first military submarine, which was built by Yefim Nikonov in 1720 for the Tsar Peter the Great in Russia. Since then newer and ever more sophisticated submarines have continued to be produced.

The pressure cooker, which he named a 'steam digester', was invented in 1679 by Denis Papin, a physicist who was born in France but moved to England. Ingredients were placed in a lidded vessel with water, which was boiled until a high pressure built up and very hot steam was produced. In turn this increased the boiling point of the water up to 266 degrees Fahrenheit/130 degrees Centigrade. Papin included a safety valve intended to prevent explosions which would raise the lid if the pressure grew too high.

The digester could thus be used, for instance, to soften animal bones to make stews and was intended to help poor people by producing meals from otherwise inedible meat and vegetables. It could, and can, produce such things as meat and chicken stock and stews several times faster than ordinary cookware. Members of the Royal Society were enthusiastic about the device after Papin gave them a demonstration. However it was expensive and could still be somewhat dangerous so was little used in households at the time but it did evolve into the modern domestic pressure cooker.

Especially from the nineteenth century onwards other people built on Papin's invention. For instance, Georg Gutbrod was producing different-sized machines in Stuttgart, Germany in the late nineteenth century and in 1919 José Alix Martínez was granted the first express cooking pot patent in Spain.

The term 'pressure cooker' became generally used in the earlier twentieth century when the invention's popularity grew in Europe and North America. By the 1970s additional innovations such as backup vents or gasket release systems and pressure-locked inner lids had been invented, which increased both the pressure cooker's safety and its popularity.

Spinning is the process of twisting drawn-out fibres together into a strong single strand called yarn. For centuries, this had been done using a spinning wheel and then the yarn was woven into cloth on a loom. Both spinning and weaving had been carried on in people's homes but by the early 18th century output was not able to satisfy the growing demand in Britain for cloth and especially cotton cloth. In about 1733 John Kay invented the flying shuttle which doubled the amount of cloth that a weaver could produce and this increased the weavers' demand for yarn.

The first invention that improved spinning was James Hargreaves' 1764/1765 spinning jenny, a machine which consisted of a metal frame containing multiple bobbins/spools for spinning wool or cotton. Bars of wood were drawn along the frame to draw out the threads waiting to be spun while a wheel was turned which revolved the bobbins so that the thread was wound onto them.

Although still a hand-powered device, the spinning jenny was a great improvement over a single spindle, even though the thread spun by Hargreaves' invention was not of the best quality. Another invention, that improved the thread's quality and strength, was the water frame devised by Richard Arkwright soon afterwards in 1765. This machine also enabled even greater quantities of yarn to be spun more quickly.

In 1779 Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule which incorporated the spinning jenny and the water frame. This machine produced thread that was even stronger and finer than that produced by previous machinery, while up to 120 spools of thread could be wound at the same time. Some inventors and their associates opened, sometimes large, factories to house their machines, so contributing to the industrialisation of the textile industry and thus to the wider Industrial Revolution in Britain.

Early attempts at putting chemical elements into some order included a table containing relatively few elements devised by French chemist Antoine Lavoisier in 1789. During the earlier nineteenth century scientists discovered more about chemical elements, so enabling more detailed tables to be drawn up. For example, in 1862 French geologist Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois arranged elements by their atomic weights in a three-dimensional spiral so that similar elements appeared in a straight line.

From 1862 onwards German chemist Julius Lothar Meyer created several tables of elements. One he devised in 1868 and published in 1870 contained 55 elements listed in order of atomic weight and arranged so that elements with the same valency (how many other atoms they can combine with) appeared in vertical lines.

Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev had published his 'Periodic System' in 1869 and this invention became the first version of our current periodic table. He arranged all the then known 63 elements by increasing atomic weight, resulting in certain types of elements occurring regularly. In 1870 he published an amended table consisting of eight columns or groups and seven rows or periods of elements. This was also arranged by increasing atomic weight which resulted in elements with similar chemical properties appearing together in blocks (also called groups). Although not every element fitted into this table perfectly, it had become generally accepted by the 1890s. Mendeleev had left gaps in the table for additional elements so it grew over time as new elements were discovered.

In 1913 English physicist Henry Moseley realised that, while arranging the table by an element's atomic mass almost always resulted in the same table order as arranging it by its atomic number (equal to its number of protons), there were exceptions. He accordingly rearranged the table by increasing atomic number and this produced a periodic table without anomalies. This amended table was adopted and continued growing to become the modern eighteen-column periodic table.

Before the twentieth century, various inventions to cool things had been devised. For instance, in 1620, Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel gave a demonstration of 'Turning Summer into Winter' for King James I of England. By using a system of troughs and vats holding nitre or salt added to snow or ice, Drebbel was able to chill part of the Great Hall of Westminster Abbey in London. In 1820 English scientist Michael Faraday discovered that compressing and liquefying ammonia then allowing it to evaporate cooled the surrounding air.

However, it was not until the early twentieth century that a powered air conditioning unit was invented. Willis Haviland Carrier was an employed American engineer who, in 1902, invented and built an air conditioning unit powered by electricity for a publishing company. This unit improved the manufacturing process at the company's printing plant as it controlled the temperature and humidity, which helped maintain consistent paper size and ink alignment.

In 1906 American engineer Stuart W Cramer was working on a system to control the temperature in textile factories when he invented the term 'air conditioning', and this term was quickly adopted by others. For instance, in 1908 Carrier's employers appointed him vice-president of a subsidiary company named the Carrier Air Conditioning Company of America. In 1915 Carrier co-founded a successful independent business and, in 1998, 'Time' magazine named him one of the '100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century'.

HIs invention was very successful as the powered air conditioning unit was quickly adopted by many other industries and then began to be used in such places as shopping malls and homes, among numerous others. The unit, whose main components were a compressor, a condenser coil and an evaporator coil, also continued to be improved. For example, Carrier had first used cold water for cooling the coils but from 1903 used ammonia as a refrigerant while later other refrigerants, such as methyl chloride, were also used. In 1928 American engineer Thomas Midgley Jr and co-workers first used safer non-flammable, non-toxic chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) coolants. However, in the 1970s these were found to damage the ozone layer and more eco-friendly refrigerants were, and continue to be, developed.

In 1917 the then German scientist Albert Einstein proposed what became the theoretical foundation for the laser and its predecessor the maser. He suggested the idea of stimulated emissions - that under certain circumstances electrons could be stimulated to emit a particular wavelength of focusable light. In 1951 American physicist Joseph Weber made public his idea for producing these stimulated emissions and using them in a microwave amplifier.

American physicists Charles H Townes, Herbert J Zeiger and James P Gordon created, and in 1953/1954 demonstrated, such a device. This stimulated or excited ammonia molecules and focused them into a resonant microwave cavity, from which electromagnetic waves were emitted. Townes named this device a 'maser', an acronym for "microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation".

From 1957 American physicists (among others) tried to invent a device that produced similar emissions in the wavelengths of visible or infrared light. Townes and Arthur L Schawlow worked on this idea together, while Richard Gordon Gould worked on his own and both Townes and Schawlow and Gould concentrated on inventing a device which emitted visible light. Gould first had the idea of using an open resonator and in 1957 was the first to use the term 'laser', an acronym for 'light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation'.

The first fully functioning laser was actually built by another American physicist, Theodore H Maiman, in 1960. This sent pulses from a photographer's flash lamp to stimulate/excite, and so increase the energy of, chromium atoms in a crystal of synthetic ruby and then made them release the extra energy to produce guided, focusable pulses of light.

Other scientists followed this lead and developed different types of laser which generated light of different wavelengths by using different elements, such as helium-neon. Since the early 1960s more powerful and more sophisticated lasers have been created and have become very widely used. For instance, they can be used for precise work such as surgery as well as in such things as barcode scanners and lighting displays.

By the later twentieth century doctors were able to gain very accurate pictures of the insides of the upper and lower parts of the digestive tract by using endoscopes - miniature cameras on tubes inserted into patients via mouth or rectum. However, the small intestine in the middle gastrointestinal tract was too narrow and convoluted for its interior to be examined in this way.

After he and Israeli gastroenterologist Eitan Scapa had tried another, not really successful, way of overcoming this problem, in 1993 Gavriel Iddan, an Israeli engineer, proposed creating a device in separate parts. One part would be a capsule containing a miniature transmitter cum wireless camera which would be swallowed by the conscious patient, move naturally through their body for several hours and then be excreted. It would send data to sensors and a data recorder attached to the patient's body. Once processed by software, this data would produce an accurate picture of the small intestine (and the other parts of the gastrointestinal tract).

From 1994 Iddan, Israeli researcher Gavriel Meron and a team of physicists and engineers worked to turn Iddan's idea for this capsule endoscope into reality. Paul Swain, a British researcher, was carrying out a similar type of work and from 1997 also worked with Iddan's team. In 1998 a company, Given Imaging, was formed to help development continue and the fully functioning invention was released through this company in 2001.

In 1997 Japanese medical scientist Hironori Yamamoto thought of a different solution to the problem and worked with others to develop the double-balloon endoscope (or enteroscope), which was released through the Fujifilm company in 2003. Yamamoto's invention consists of an endoscope inside another tube which is inserted into the anaesthetised patient and moved to their small intestine. Once there, balloons on the outer tube and on the tip of the endoscope inflate and move the intestine wall outwards so the camera can record what is inside. Like the capsule endoscope, this invention enables medical professionals to more accurately diagnose, and thus better treat, diseases of the small intestine.