Amazing Inventors of Ordinary Things Quiz

Answer: The Zipper

Judson's original concept of the 'clasp-locker' was a hook-and-eye device intended to replace shoelaces and buttons on boots. Nowadays, if you look at your zipper, you'll usually see the initials YKK. It stands for Yoshida
Kogyo Kabushibibaisha, the world's largest zipper manufacturer.

Answer: Bar codes

Bernard Silver was a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Pennsylvania back in 1948, when a local food chain store owner asked him about looking into a way to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver got together with fellow student Woodland to create the 'bar code'.

Answer: Stainless steel

After Berthier abandoned his experiment, British scientists further perfected the metal by mixing chromium with Berthier's carbon steel to form an alloy.
Then, the German manufacturer Krupp devised the metal that became known as 'stainless steel'. This metal was first used in knives, then later in forks and spoons. The new metal meant hours taken off the then-normal routine of polishing flatware. The Silver Company of Meridian's first set of cutlery was issued in a pattern called the 'Ambassador' and was quickly scooped up by nearby hotels.

Answer: The automatic dishwasher

Mrs. Cochrane, wife of an Illinois politician, was too rich to wash her own dishes, but was tired of sending out for replacement china. The invention quickly caught on with her friends and nearby eating establishments. Her 'Cochrane Dish-Washer' won the highest award at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

Her contraption was mostly used in business, but a smaller model for home use came out in 1914.

Answer: Vaseline

Chesebrough discovered that when applied to cuts and abrasions (many of which he inflicted on himself as a guinea pig), the petroleum jelly sped up the healing process. He reportedly gave the famous name from the German word 'vasser' (water) and the Greek word 'elaion' (olive oil).

When a massive fire destroyed a New York business in 1912, many of the victims had their burns treated with Vaseline, which then became a staple in hospitals everywhere.

Answer: Coppertone

Hard to believe suntanning was a 20th Century concoction. Soldiers noted to Dr. Green that their skin took on a 'copper tone', hence the name of the company. Artist Joyce Ballantyne Brand used her young daughter, Cheri Irwin, to create the now-famous image of the girl playing tug-of-war with a puppy over her swimsuit. Early TV ads featured actress Jodie Foster, who was three at the time.

Answer: Shampoo

The Egyptians used a combination of water and citrus juice to cut the sebum oil that grows naturally in the scalp. It was in Germany in the 1890s when the present-day formula was perfected. The modern name actually came from the Hindu word 'champo' ('to massage'). Mr. Breck had searched for years to find a cure for his receding hairline, culminating with the opening of a hair salon in 1908.

By the 1930s, the Breck hair care business (and the equally popular 'Breck Girl') was one of the top businesses in the country.

Answer: Sneakers

The U.S. rubber company definitely had children in mind for the sneakers. The name for the running shoes came from the combination of 'kid' and the Latin root word for foot, 'ped'. Hence the name 'Keds'. The basic design stayed the same until the early 1960s, when University of Oregon track star Phil Knight and coach Bill Bowerman brought in designs from Europe and Japan under the name of the Greek goddess of victory...Nike.

Answer: Relieve body aches and pains

Hoffman had been looking for something to cure his father's rheumatoid arthritis when he hit upon the overlooked product. The Bayer pharmaceutical company of Dusseldorf, where Hoffman worked, knew he had hit on an important discovery. They came up with the name by taking the 'a' from acetyl, 'spir' from the Latin spiraea and 'in', which was a popular suffix for drugs at the time...aspirin. During World War I, Bayer made the drug only for the Central Powers, so the Allies relied on Australian scientists, George Nicholas and Henry Woolf Smith, to make what they thought was a superior alternative called 'Aspro'. Nevertheless, the Bayer trademark was given to the Allies as part of the Treaty of Versailles ('Aspro' would eventually be sold to Bayer).

Answer: Nylon

Created by the DuPont chemical company in 1938, the synthetic material 'nylon' was all but guaranteed to be virtually indestructable. 'Nylon Day' was marked with great fanfare (and quite a bit of pandemonium) across the U.S.

Answer: Roller skates

Merlin wanted to make an impression rolling into the party playing a violin. He made the impression, forgetting to add any type of stopping mechanism and crashing into a mirror, destroying his violin. The first set of roller skates (strapped to normal shoes) had two wheels aligned along the center of the shoe, much like the 4-wheel roller blades of today. Until 1844, when ball bearings were added to the wheels, the skates were unpredictable and often quite dangerous.

Answer: Chewing gum

The man most remembered for squandering his forces at the Alamo, then losing Texas at the battle of San Jacinto, had, by 1855, gone into exile from his own country. He brought with him a large supply of chicle a resin of the sapodilla tree, by the time he wound up in Staten Island, New York.

A local acquaintance, Thomas Adams, experimented with the stuff for other uses, but instead opted to sell it as a chewing substitute for wax paraffin. By the 1890s, flavor was added and the gum was mass-produced by former soap salesman William Wrigley, Jr.

Answer: The Frisbee

Morrison, and the Wham-O company of San Gabriel, California soon discovered that Ivy League students (especially at Yale) had made a sport of tossing pie tins, made by the Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, for the past decade (the pie company, in fact, had been in existence since the 1870s).

The name 'frisbie' appealed to Wham-O president Richard Knerr, and, subtley altered, the name stuck.

Answer: Liquid Paper

Ms. Graham had some experience with the arts, painting the bank windows for the holidays. She surmised that since artists paint over their mistakes, so could she. Later versions were also available in green and red, to match the color of the paper. By the time her formula was sold to the Gillette company in 1979, she had amassed a fortune of about 50 million dollars, half of which went to her only son, Michael, when she died a year later.
And, yes, Michael Nesmith is the musician, video music pioneer, philanthropist and former member of the music group, the Monkees.

Answer: Contact lenses

Da Vinci's proposal called for placing the eye against a short, water-filled tube sealed by a flat lens. Dr. Fick's model wasn't much better. It was hand-blown glass cut to shape the eye (not the cornea, mind you, but the whole eye). It wasn't until 1936 that the German firm I.G. Farben made contact lenses possible with the invention of plexiglas. Widespread commercial use in the U.S. came in the mid-1940s.