Inventions from the 1960s to the 1990s Quiz

Answer: 1960s

George Harry Heilmeier was born on May 22, 1936, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., and died April 21, 2014. The National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted American engineer, manager, and trailblazer George H. Heilmeier for his pioneering work and contribution to liquid crystal displays.

Heilmeier began working at RCA Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1958. There, he worked on a variety of projects, including organic semiconductors, millimetre wave generation, tunnel diode downconverters, ferroelectric thin-film devices, and electro-optic phenomena in liquid and molecular crystals.

In 1964, George H. Heilmeier, while he was working at the RCA laboratories, succeeded in achieving colour switching in a homeotropically orientated liquid crystal using field-induced realignment of dichroic dyes. Heilmeier's research on scattering effects in liquid crystals continued as a result of practical issues with this novel electro-optical effect. This led to the development of the first functional liquid crystal display in 1968, which was based on the dynamic scattering mode (DSM) that Heilmeier named. This opened the door for the development of portable electronics, computer displays, and flat-panel televisions.

Answer: 1960s

Stephanie Louise Kwolek was an American chemist best known for inventing Kevlar. Kwolek was born on July 31, 1923, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., and passed away on June 18, 2014. She was inducted as the fourth female inventor into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1995. Kwolek received multiple honours for her contributions to polymer chemistry, such as the Perkin Medal, the IRI Achievement Award, and the National Medal of Technology.

In 1965, the entire process of creating Kevlar happened by accident. When studying molecule chains at low temperatures, Kwolek discovered a certain type of molecule chain formation that was incredibly rigid and powerful. Unlike nylon polymers, which are thick and transparent, the solution was weird; it was very thin and foggy. This solution produced the strongest fibres that were imaginable. The fibre was strong enough to deflect knives and bullets and was thought to be five times stronger than steel on an equal weight basis.

Nowadays, Kevlar is used in several areas including the police, sport, transport, body armour, and bullet-proof vests, to name but a few.

Answer: 1960s

The BASIC computer language was invented at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1963 by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. First appearing on May 1, 1964. BASIC stands for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Initially, applications on the school's General Electric computer system were successfully run using BASIC.

BASIC has been one of the most widely used computer programming languages, with learning a basic computer language thought to be a straightforward first step for students before more complex languages were developed.

Answer: 1970s

The 3D combination puzzle known as the Rubik's Cube was created in 1974 by Hungarian architect and sculptor Ern Rubik. It was initially called the Magic Cube before becoming known as the Rubik's Cube in 1980, and becoming one of the best-selling toys of all time. Even though Rubik invented the puzzle, he couldn't solve the puzzle to start with. It took a university a whole month to solve the cube, and at first they weren't even certain that it could be solved - maybe by a computer but not a human!

There are 43 quintillion (43.252.003.274.489.856.000) possible ways to arrange the Rubik's Cube.

The Ideal Toy Corporation purchased the rights to this puzzle in 1980 and renamed it 'Rubik's Cube' to avoid international patent problems arising from Hungary.

Answer: 1970s

The public was first given access to disposable lighters in 1973. The world saw its first disposable lighter, with an adjustable flame, thanks to the brilliant idea of Marcel Bich, the Frenchman who founded BIC.

The first mention of the BIC lighter appeared in a 1972 story published in Time magazine, which stated that BIC was working on creating a lighter that would last up to 3,000 lightings before dying. Television advertisements from 1975 popularised the phrase "flick your BIC," which is still in use today, to entice new customers.

In the US, BIC started promoting its EZ Reach lighters in 2022 using artwork created by Willie Nelson, Martha Stewart, and Snoop Dogg. Given that Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg are well-known celebrities who have used cannabis, these commercials use humour that alluded to cannabis use.

Answer: 1970s

Masaru Ibuka, a co-founder of Sony, originally said he wanted a device that could play music so he could listen to music on trans-Pacific flights. This was the original reason the Walkman was designed.

The Walkman TPS-L2, manufactured by Sony, was introduced to the public on July 1, 1979. It was the first personal portable cassette player and was powered by either two AA rechargeable or standard-type batteries. The Walkman was first released as the "Sound About" in the United States and the "Stowaway" in the United Kingdom. The first machines were blue-and-silver and had two earphone jacks.

Sony originally introduced the Pressman monotape recorder in 1978 and sold it to journalists as a means of recording audio. This model was later tweaked to become the Walkman.

A stereo amplifier was substituted for the record function and speaker by Sony engineer Nobutoshi Kihara in response to Sony chairman Akio Morita's request for a gadget to listen to opera on his frequent trans-Pacific flights. Voila! The music player was created.

Answer: 1980s

Born in Oxford, Oxfordshire, on January 9, 1950, Sir Alec John Jeffreys is a British geneticist best known for creating DNA profiling and genetic fingerprinting techniques that are now used globally in forensic science to support police detective work and settle paternity and immigration disputes.

In 1984, at the University of Leicester, Alec Jeffreys made the discovery that human DNA is unique to each individual, unless you have a twin. After more investigation, he learnt that a person could be identified by the differences in their DNA.

Using his newly discovered "genetic fingerprinting" technique, he successfully tested his theories when two murders happened close to the university. The novel approach succeeded in clearing one suspect and finding the other suspect guilty.

Answer: 1980s

MTV is an American cable television station -the name was originally an acronym for Music Television. Officially, it was introduced on August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time. According to records, the first words spoken on the channel were "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll." I'm sure most of you will know the very first video shown was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. Because it was the first station to play music videos 24/7, it became the most influential media channel for music, pop culture, and entertainment.

The channel also promoted new artists like Madonna, Prince, and Duran Duran. Duran Duran videos were later more like a short film, very expensive to make but of the highest quality. Even some of the older acts who had faded came back into the limelight with new videos that promoted their songs.

MTV is owned by Paramount Media Networks (Paramount Global), and its parent company is MTV Entertainment Group.

Answer: 1980s

On May 11, 1946, Robert Koffler Jarvik was born in Midland, Michigan, in the United States. The artificial heart known as Jarvik-7 is credited to him. On December 2, 1982, at the University of Utah, Dr. William DeVries successfully implanted the Jarvik 7 in Seattle dentist Barney Clark. The dentist was the first person to receive an artificial human heart; therefore, you may consider him to be a Guinea pig. However, the dentist had spent the last few months in the hospital with a machine keeping him alive.

Although Barney Clark passed away 112 days after receiving the transplant, it opened the door for more transplants, which served as a stopgap for patients awaiting real hearts from donors. For the next ten years, Jarvik and his associates focused on creating mechanical pumps that might supplement a failing heart instead of replacing it. Many patients are able to wait the months, or even years, until they discover a donor heart thanks to these devices. These implants, which run on batteries, enable people with heart problems to move around and lead relatively normal lives.

Answer: 1990s

Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the duo behind Google. Page and Brin first met at Stanford University in 1995 and, by 1996, they were working together on a project called Backrub, which was a search engine. The pair then worked on their new project, Google, which was officially incorporated in September 1998 when they registered the domain name Google.com.

They kept improving Google, which stood out from other search engines because it employed "PageRank," a novel algorithm that assessed the value of pages based on backlinks, to obtain better, more pertinent results. In the early days of the Internet, searches just counted how many times a word appeared on a page.

Answer: 1990s

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. Bezos became a successful American business magnate who founded Amazon, the largest e-commerce and cloud computing firm in the world, and served as its executive chairman, president, and CEO.

Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994 in Bellevue, Washington as an online book marketplace. Over time, it added many more product categories to its portfolio with its variety earning it the nickname of "The Everything Store."

Answer: 1990s

Founded in 1865 as a pulp mill, Nokia Corporation is a multinational company specialising in consumer electronics, information technology, and telecommunications. Nokia's main office is located in the Helsinki metropolitan area in Espoo, Finland.

The first mobile phone to be mass-produced was the Nokia 1011, which was released in 1992. Back in the day, the monochrome LCD and the extending antenna were at the cutting edge of technology. It could transmit and receive text messages and store 99 phone numbers. In 1994 Nokia started using the iconic Nokia ringtone. When the phone was first made available it was very expensive, but once mass production got under way the price dropped to a more affordable level.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nokia experienced tremendous growth in popularity and rose to the top of the global mobile phone manufacturer rankings. Millions of people fell in love with its classic models, like the Nokia 2010, 2110, 3310 and Nokia 5110, because of their dependability and extended battery life.