Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. The world's largest manufacturer of business machines created this innovative electric typewriter. A rotating type element rather than individual typebars would strike the page to print the letters. What is this once ubiquitous but now obsolete machine?
2. Our next exhibit is the USA's first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculator. It seemed this bad boy would never become obsolete, as it remained in use for specific applications well into the 1990s, but thanks to the personal computer, it finally it saw its last days. What is this once omnipresent but now obsolete machine?
3. Moving on to our third exhibit is our collection of duplicating machines. The oldest one here is a simultaneous writer, or polygraph, patented by John Hawkins in 1803 (not to be confused with the lie detector invented in 20th century). It is simply a pen attached to another pen through a bridge on a platform that moved in five degrees of freedom. As you wrote, the second pen would duplicate it exactly. Oh, but I see that one of these others is mislabeled! Which duplicator is not correctly matched with its alternate name?
4. Our next exhibit is a model of a "water-powered" cable train of the nineteenth century. It was not "water-powered" in the sense we may normally think of. This energy-efficient vehicle could go up and down a steep hill quite easily. It had no engine; so how such a cable-car filled with 10 passengers go up a hill? (Hint: Think about the purpose of the water.)
5. In the next display case, we see a model of various types of long-distance power transmission in use in the nineteenth century. Aside from electricity, which eventually supplanted all, which of these was the most efficient over a distance of just a few kilometers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century?
6. Before the modern hydroelectric dam, there was the water mill. Our next exhibit is an obsolete form: floating mill. Essentially, it is a waterwheel and a milling house floating on the water, moored to a riverbank or anchored in a stream. Which was NOT an advantage of this method over the fixed water mill?
7. Now let's look at domestic technology. Our next machine, a mangle, is not one typically found in North American households since World War II. A sturdy metal frame holds two geared rollers. Normally, a housewife or professional washerwoman would crank it by hand, but in a factory setting steam-power was used. This particular model built in 1902 is a gas-heated mangle. What generally was its purpose?
8. Next is our diorama of agricultural technology of 19th century North America. I see lots of equipment, but wait, there is something out of place, something that had not been invented yet. What is it?
9. Here we have a television from the 1990s. Its display uses a vacuum tube that fires electrons from a gun to excite phosphors on a glass fluorescent screen, in an effect known as cathodoluminescence. By what acronym was this device commonly known?
10. Our final exhibit! Before GPS satellites, seafarers relied on celestial navigation. In this exhibit is a device commonly used in the 18th-20th centuries to measure a celestial object's altitude (the angular distance between the object and the horizon), an essential part of navigating by the stars. What is it called?
Source: Author
gracious1
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WesleyCrusher before going online.
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