Belgian Inventors, Scientists and Entrepreneurs Quiz

Answer: the trolley tramway

Born in Lichtervelde in Flanders in 1846. He was nicknamed "the Belgian Edison."
The stroboscope was another Belgian invention (Joseph Plateau).

Answer: Edouard Empain, a Belgian financier

Leopold II interfered a lot with Africa and was a great builder within his own capital Brussels, but Belgian royal interference in the affairs of the French Republic would have caused diplomatic problems.
Hector Guimard was the Belgian architect who built the popular Art Nouveau style wrought-iron entrances to the Parisian metro (some of which still survive).
George Goethals played a major role in the construction of the Panama Canal and was the first Governor of the Canal Zone.
Edouard Empain, born at Beloeil in Hainaut, was the son of a primary school teacher. In 1881, at the age of 29, he founded his own bank.
In 1883 he became the co-founder of a French railway company (la Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Nord). In the next years he built more railways, but his main contribution was the building of tramway systems in Tashkent, Cairo, Astrakan, Teheran. His industrial empire was later to develop into the Empain-Schneider industrial company. Against the wishes of such people as Victor Hugo, he pushed through the building of the Parisian metro which was opened on 19th of July 1900. One of the few French intellectuals who had supported him was Jules Verne.
France was definitely rather late in "modernising" her capital.

Answer: Gerard Blitz

Blitz had been born in Amsterdam, came to Antwerp where he worked as a diamond-cutter, and became an important diamond-trader. He took Belgian nationality and became a member of the Belgian waterpolo-team. During World War II he was a member of the Resistance.

His holiday club company was slightly influenced by his socialist kibbutz ideas. Gilbert Trigano became Chief Executive Officer in 1963. His son Serge succeeded to him in 1993. When the company began to run into trouble, the management was modernised and a new Chairman of the Board was nominated, Philippe Bourguignon. Bourguignon severed some of the links with the original Blitz family.

Answer: Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir

Lenoir (1822-1900) was born in Belgium, but moved to Paris. His first engine was patented in 1860. Looking much like a double-acting steam-engine, it fired an uncompressed charge of air and illuminating gas with an ignition sytem of his own finding. His work with electro-plating led him to other electrical inventions too, such as the railway telegraph.
Dion was born at Nantes in 1856. With his engineers, Bouton and Trepardoux, he created one of the first French car companies.
Later he also founded the Automobile Club de Paris.
Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor, both ex-students of the French Ecole Centrale, joined their strengths and created a successful car-manufactury of which Armand Peugeot was one of the first customers.
Ettore Arco Isidoro Bugatti, born in Milan 1881, died in Paris in 1947. His factory was at Molsheim, ALsace. He built a very small number of super top-class luxury motor cars.

Answer: blue and gold

Nagelmaeckers also had got substantial help from Colonel William d' Alton Mann, an American who in 1872 had been granted a U.S. patent for his so-called "boudoir cars." Mann became a Member of Congress for Alabama.

Answer: Paris in France

In 1914, due to World War I, the "Orient Express" ceased operating for some time. A couple of times in the course of its history the train was attacked by terrorists.
The boattrip section was the crossing-over to Istanbul.

Answer: Jan Palfyn

Rega was born at Louvain in 1690, studied at the Louvain University and then in Paris. In 1718, he became a doctor and university professor in his hometown. In 1721 he published his "Tractatus medicus de sympathia," which contains some of the first hints about the psycho-somatic nature of certain diseases. He shows the influence of the brain on the stomach.
Dodoens is famous as a herb specialist. He was born in 1517 at Malines and died in Holland at Leyden in 1585. His "Book of Herbs" was published in 1554. It was translated by another Fleming, Clusius as "Histoire des Plantes" 1557.
Dr Jules Bordet, born at Soignies in 1870, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1920. He has been called the father of immunology. The Bordet-Wassermann test is still used to make a diagnosis for diseases such as syphilis, typhoid fever, etc.
Jan Palfyn was born in 1650 and died in Ghent, 1730. In 1710 he published a treatise about "the most important surgical techniques as well in the hard as in the weak parts of the human body." His "Anatomy of the Human Body," 1718, was intended as a handbook for surgeons. His "forceps" was soon nicknamed the "Hand of Palfyn."

Answer: Rembert Dodoens

Dodoens was the natural child of a physician in Malines. His father was of Frisian origin.
Minckelers was born at Maastricht, at that time still a part of the Southern Netherlands. Minckelers lived from 1748 till 1824. He was a physicist and pharmacologist at the University of Leuven.
Simon Stevin was born in Brugge in 1548 and died in Den Haag, Holland, in 1620.
He became a bookkeeper in Antwerp, then returned to Bruges as a clerk in a tax office. Because of the religious wars in the Low Countries he fled to the North where he became a quartermaster in the Northern Netherlandish army. He advised the Prince of Nassau on the building of fortifications.As an engineer he also built windmills, locks and ports.
He introduced the use of the decimal in mathematics. He introduced the notations +, - and . in "algebra." Three years before Galileo (whose heliocentric views he shared), he reported that different weights fall a given distance in the same time.
Jan de Wier, born at Cleve (then part of the Netherlands) in 1515, died at Tecklenburg in 1588. In his "De praestigiis daemonum" he rebutts the hateful witch-hunter's handbook "Malleus Maleficarum." He was a fervent opponent of the Inquisition, and seems to have influenced Sigmund Freud with some of his concepts.

Answer: False

Van Helmont is a transitional figure between medieval alchemy and modern science. He still believed in the philosopher's stone. On the other hand, he had little confidence in herbal medicine and was considered a "medicus per ignem," because he used sulphur and mercury to cure certain skin diseases such as scabies, which he suffered from himself.
He investigated gases such as carbon dioxide. It's van Helmont who created the name "gas." That word was a blend of the Greek word chaos and the Dutch word "geest" ("spirit").
Of course it was not him who filled air-balloons with coal-gas. De Montgolfier brothers started their experiments only after van Helmont's time. It was after the invention of the air-balloon in 1783 that a local lord, Engelbert van Arenberg( 1750-1820 ), asked a Louvain University professor Jan Pieter Minckelers after a cheaper gas to replace warm air or hydrogen. In 1783, Minckelers even illuminated his auditorium with gas!

Answer: Robert Cailliau

Robert Cailliau was born at Tongeren in North-East Belgium in 1947.
Zimmer (Lier,1888-1970), clockmaker to the King of the Belgians, constructed two world-famous masterpieces: the Centenary Clock which he gave to his native town of Lier on the one hundredth anniversary of Belgium's independence. The other is the Astronomic Studio which was shown at the world-exhibition in New York 1939.
Heymans was formerly Professor of Pharmacology and Rector at the University of Ghent. His discovery of the role of the cardio-aortic and the carotid sinus areas in the regulation of respiration earned him the Nobel Prize in 1938.
Solvay invented the industrial process for sodium carbonate production in 1861. In 1863 he established near Charleroi, Belgium, the first plant for making soda by this process.