All That We Have Done Trivia Quiz

Answer: Levi Spear Parmly (1790-1859)

Dental floss is a piece of string used to clean the spaces between your teeth that a toothbrush can't reach. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a dentist by the name of Levi Spear Parmly who invented dental floss in 1815. Parmly believed that this was the cause of most diseases due to the fact that (at the time) there was nothing to get rid of the plaque that was in spaces too small for a toothbrush.

However, it would not be until approximately 65 years that floss became available for commercial use.

Answer: Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884)

In 1831, Cyrus McCormick invented a working reaper, a machine that cuts and gathers crops when the crops are ripe. Prior to its invention, this would be done by hand and therefore take much longer. Since the crops had to be ripe, this would also mean that farmers would have to be quick about cutting and gathering crops.

It was estimated that his reaper was about 25 times quicker than if it was done manually. In Herbert N. Casson's book about McCormick's life, "Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work", it was said that McCormick did more than anybody else "to abolish the famine of the cities and the drudgery of the farm - to feed the hungry and straighten the bent backs of the world".

Answer: Samuel FB Morse (1791-1872)

Samuel FB Morse was the inventor of the telegraph. The first steps came when Morse was traveling by ship and saw experiments done with electromagnets. This would lead to the single wire telegraph in an attempt to shorten time it took to deliver a message. In 1832, he created the telegraph, but it would be another 12 years before a message was sent due to factors such as needing another telegraph to send a telegram to.

In 1844, Morse sent a telegram from Washington DC to Baltimore, Maryland. The communication took only a few moments rather than an estimated two days, which is what it would take if the message was delivered by horse, the standard way of communicating. Since words could not be part of a telegraph, he invented the Morse code, which used dots and dashes.

The first message was sent was a passage from the Bible, specifically Numbers 23:23 ("What hath God wrought?"). The idea for this message came from the daughter of the man who helped Morse obtain a patent for the telegram.

Answer: William Morrison (1860-1926)

A dentist by the name of William Morrison invented cotton candy, which all started based on his love of candy. Sugar is placed in the machine that produces the cotton candy. It is melted, cooled off, and transformed into a crystallized form of sugar. The operator then dips a cone into the machine and rotates it, so the crystallized sugar can be attached to the cone. Finally, it is ready to eat. Despite this emphasis on sugar, there is not as much as sugar as one might expect in cotton candy. This makes it better to eat than most other sugar-based foods, as least as far as healthy teeth are concerned.

Although invented in 1897, it was introduced to the public at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Not long after, both cotton candy and the machine itself could be purchased by the people, so they could make their own treat. At the time cotton candy had no flavor and was colored white, as opposed to the flavorful pink treat that people think of now when they think of cotton candy.

Answer: Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

In 1898, Nikola Tesla invented the radio remote control. This device would allow signals to be picked up from one ship by another. During the experimental stage, Tesla was able to pick up signals 30 miles away! The first radio remote control was in essence a boat itself that would pick up radio signals. This would cause the boat to appear to move on its own, if a person did not know about the radio remote control.

At a public demonstration, Tesla even played a trick on the spectators. He made them believe the boat could think on its own. When a person asked a question (like what is the cube root of 64; the answer of which is four), Tesla would caused the lights on the boat to flash four times! Although Tesla believed it might be used in military combat, the radio remote control was not used for such a purpose until decades later.

Answer: Willis Carrier (1876-1950)

In 1902, an engineer by the name of Willis Carrier became the inventor of the air conditioner, although it wasn't until 1906 in which he was granted the patent. Carrier noticed on one humid summer that paper would grow and shrink due to the humidity. To ensure that this wouldn't happen, especially at a place like a printing company that uses a lot of paper, he wanted to create a device that would allow a person to control not just the humidity, but also the temperature, ventilation, and the circulation of the air.

Carrier took note of the fact that a constant dew-point depression (the difference between the temperature and the dew point temperature) would solve the problem, which is what he wanted is air conditioner to do. Primitive forms of air conditioning had existed for thousands of year, but they looked nothing like a modern air conditioner. It would also require adjustments based on the humidity whereas the modern air conditioner would work the same regardless of humidity.

Answer: Lester Wire (1887-1958)

The inventor of the electric traffic light was Lester Wire, an officer of the Salt Lake City police. The way traffic was handled before the traffic light was that police officers would direct the traffic, usually timing it so that the lanes would have equal amount of time to pass through the intersection. Wire wanted an easier way for traffic to be handled, so he set out to create the electric traffic light.

He said that he used Matthew 5:15 from the Bible as a source. (According to the NIV translation, it says "Neither do people light a lamp and put under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.") These traffic lights were wired to electric lines and the bulbs were dipped in either green or red paint. An early prototype of a traffic light was used in the United Kingdom, but it was not quite successful.

Answer: Henry Ford (1863-1947)

Henry Ford created the assembly line in order to reduce the amount of time it took to produce an item. Prior to the assembly line, one part of an item would be assembled, then the next, then the third, and so on. With the invention of the assembly line, all parts could be done at the same time, albeit on different items. Let's take a car as an example. If tires and gears would be need to be included, it was originally firs the tires and then the gears. With the assembly line, one person could be working on the tires while at the same time, another person would work on gears on a different car.

Answer: Ruth Wakefield (1903-1977)

The first chocolate chip cookies were invented by Ruth Wakefield, circa 1938. This was a deliberate choice and not an accidental invention. Wakefield worked as a chef in a tourist lodge and wanted to give her customers something different from the ordinary cookies they would normally be given.

She invented the cookie by putting parts of a chocolate bar into a cookie. These types of cookies were originally called Toll House chocolate crunch cookies, with Toll House being the name of the tourist lodge that she and her husband bought and ran.

Answer: Raymond Damadian (1936-2022)

The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine was invented by Raymond Damadian in 1971, although it wouldn't be until 1977 that it was used for a full body scan. Damadian saw his grandmother die of breast cancer when he was only 10 years ago, and it was that experience that led to his interest in detecting cancer. The MRI machine would provide a detailed image of the inside of the entire body or whatever part of the body was being scanned.

This would allow doctors to detect whether there was something wrong, and perhaps deadly, going on inside the body. Controversially, in 2003, it was not Damadian, but Peter Mansfield and Paul Lauterbur, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, even though they were improving on Damadian's invention.