A Little Bit of Everything 4 Trivia Quiz

Answer: King

King Camp Gillette was born in 1855 in Wisconsin. At the age of 17 he became a travelling salesman for the man that had invented cork-lined bottle caps. That's where he learned that disposable items made for recurrent sales. In 1895 he had his breakthrough idea of disposable razorblades, but it took another six years to iron out the technical difficulties.

The breakthrough came when Gillette razors were issued to the American troops in WWI. Many found them convenient and continued to use them when they came back home.

Answer: 175.000 cubic metres per second

While the Amazon is not the longest river, it is certainly the one with the largest discharge of water. It carries about 20% of all the water in all the rivers in the world. It drains an area of more than 6 million square kilometres. It would take no more than 75 seconds for it to fill the main factory building at Boeing's Everett factory, which is supposed to be the world's largest man-made enclosed space.

Answer: 1858

'Big Ben' is of course the hour bell in the clock-tower of the Houses of Parliament, not the tower itself, as many people seem to believe. When the Houses of Parliament were being planned, the Astronomer Royal was asked to draft the specifications for the clock. What he came up with was so exacting, that most clockmakers at the time thought it unattainable.

It was several years later, that Edmund Beckett Denison won a competition to design the clock. He was apparently a fairly unpleasant person who thought he knew everything about anything (should feel right at home here then) and decided to design the bells as well.

He diverged from traditional design and material and designed the hour bell to be larger than anything previously cast in England.

Not surprisingly, the first attempt failed. The second attempt on Saturday 10th April 1858 yielded the bell we still hear today. It cracked after two months, because Mr. Denison decided to use a bigger hammer to strike it than the bell makers had suggested - but that gives it its distinctive, if less than perfect, tone.

Answer: 45 g

Dr. John Paul Stapp was the head of the Deceleration Project of the American Air Force. This project was set up in 1945 to find ways to protect pilots in crashes and high-speed ejections. This was after all at the same time that jet fighters were coming into service and attempts were being made to break the sound barrier.

The setup consisted of a 2.000 ft rail track at Edwards Air Force Base (then Muroc), originally used for V1 research. This was equipped with a 1,500 pound, rocket-powered car and what is believed to be the strongest mechanical breaking system ever built. Before the tests carried out at the facility, common belief was that the human body could withstand no more than 16g.

The team around Dr. Stapp developed new harnesses, which allowed much higher g-forces to be endured. Dr. Stapp was a very frequent test-subject and in one of his runs set the record with 45g.

Answer: About 112°C

The higher the pressure, the higher the temperature at which water boils - that's the principle of the pressure-cooker. Since the air pressure on the water increases the further down you go, so does the temperature at which it boils (at a rate of approximately 1°C every 300m). If you go further up on the other hand, water will boil at lower temperatures. On Mt. Everest water boils at about 70°C - making it very difficult to make a proper cup of tea. Since the deepest mine is about 3.600 m deep, water boils at a temperature roughly 12°C higher than at sea level.

Answer: Kelston Manor, Somerset

It was Sir John Harrington who built the first modern type flushing toilet into his manor house during the 1580s. When his godmother Queen Elizabeth I. visited him in 1592, she tried his contraption out and was so impressed, that she had one installed in Richmond Palace.

It did however take another 200 years for the idea to catch on. The first patent for a flushing toilet wasn't granted until 1775. And while the Romans had public toilets, where the waste was flushed away by running water, it is not really the same.

Answer: Helsinki

The Games had originally been awarded to Tokyo. But since Japan was waging a war of aggression in Asia at the time, many nations threatened to boycott the Games. That's why the Olympic committee decided to move the Games to Helsinki instead. But then of course WWII started with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Games were cancelled altogether. Only three Games have not been held in the history of the modern Olympics: 1916 (which was scheduled for Berlin) because of WWI and 1940 and 1944 because of WWII.

Answer: Tuvalu

Tuvalu is a tiny group of islands North-East of Australia near Fiji and Samoa. It became independent from the British in the 1970s. The highest point is only 5 metres above sea-level. If the sea-level rises even more than it already has, the population of 11.500 will be in real trouble - as will lots of other people.

The differences between the highest and lowest points for the other candidates are: Bahrain - 122 m, Netherlands - 328 m, Vatican City - 56 m.

Answer: .edu

The Domain Name System DNS was developed in 1983 and included the following top level domains: .com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, .org. The first domain ever registered was symbolics.com on 15.03.1985. But among the first ten domains there were seven .edu domains and only three .com domains.

They were, in the order they were registered: symbolics.com, bbn.com, cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, berkeley.edu, ucla.edu, rutgers.edu, mit.edu, think.com. Almost two and a half months went by between the first and the last of these ten registrations.

In 2004 40.000 new domains were registered every day.

Answer: 1958

While pinball machines and other coin operated games had been around for quite some time and others had toyed with the idea before, the first game played on a cathode ray tube was developed by William A. Higinbotham. He worked as a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory at the time. To ease the boredom of visitors to the annual open day at the lab, he decided to make a game out of an oscilloscope, a small computer and two control boxes with the help of Robert V. Dvorak.

The game they built was a side-view tennis game, but it didn't record a score. Apparently it was a big hit with the visitors to the open days. Commercial games didn't appear until 1971 (arcade) and 1972 (home) but since then videogames haven't really looked back ...