A Voyage of Discovery Trivia Quiz

Answer: Galileo Galilei

In late December 1609, the astronomer Galileo Galilei was undertaking observations of Jupiter using a telescope to which he had made several improvements, allowing a magnification of 20x. Using this telescope, he discovered what he initially thought were three new stars. Between January and March 1610, he continued his observations, further discovering a fourth body, and also that they were not in fact fixed stars, but were orbiting Jupiter itself.

This discovery showed that the then accepted view of the Earth being the centre of the universe, with everything orbiting around it, was wrong, as it proved that there were objects that orbited other celestial bodies. Galileo wrote up his findings in a work called "Sidereus Nuncius", in which he named the new objects as the 'Medicean Stars', after the four brothers of the Medici family.

The German astronomer Simon Marius, who independently observed the four objects around the same time as Galileo, instead named them after lovers of Zeus (the Greek equivalent of Jupiter), which are the names that are used today - Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, known collectively as the 'Galilean moons'.

Answer: William Harvey

In 1628, physician William Harvey published his work "De Motu Cordis", in which he laid out his ideas on the work of the heart and how it moved blood through the body. At the time, the work of the Roman physician Galen of Pergamon still prevailled among western medicine, which stated that there were two types of blood - arterial blood, which flowed from the heart, and venous blood, produced in the liver. Harvey's work stated that, in fact, the heart pumped blood around the body, with the action of the left ventricle pushing it out in the arteries to all parts of the body itself, while the right ventricle moves it into the pulmonary artery and thus to the lungs.

He also observed that the veins had valves that allowed blood in them to flow in only one direction, through which he concluded that it was the veins that took blood back to the heart.

When he published his work, which was based to a great extent on inference and hypothesis rather than experimentation, Harvey predicted that his discovery would be met with scepticism and ridicule - he was proved correct in this, with it taking as much as twenty years for his ideas on circulation to be accepted.

Answer: Dimitri Mendeleev

Although there had been attempts to classify chemical elements into so-called 'periods' by their atomic weight before, it was the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev who, in preparing his textbook "Principles of Chemistry", began to notice patterns among the properties of known elements, which he entered into a table. Beginning with nine elements, Mendeleev added more to his extended periodic table, eventually presenting his findings in 1869 to the Russian Chemical Society.

He subsequently published his new periodic table, containing all of the then known elements, as well as predicting eight undiscovered elements, in both Russian and German chemistry journals.

Although some of his placings of known elements were subsequently shown to be incorrect, Mendeleev's system correctly predicted the properties of gallium (discovered 1875), scandium (discovered 1879) and germanium (discovered 1886). By 1890, Mendeleev's periodic table had been universally accepted as a basic standard in the study of chemistry.

Answer: Edward Jenner

The idea that people previously infected with cowpox could then be immune to smallpox was first postulated in 1768 by physician John Fewster, which led to a number of investigations into the idea of introducing cowpox into a healthy individual, to instigate immunity.

However, it was not until Edward Jenner undertook his investigations that the concept received widespread attention. Having realised that milkmaids tended to be immune to smallpox, Jenner theorised that it was pus in the blisters on their hands that provided this immunity. To test his theory, in 1796 conducted an experiment whereby he introduced cowpox taken from the blisters of one of his milkmaids into the son of his gardener.

The boy suffered some mild symptoms, but no full-blown infection. Jenner then injected the boy with the smallpox virus, and found that the disease did not develop. Jenner undertook further experiments on 23 more subjects, including his own 11-month old son, before publishing his findings. Jenner's work was eventually accepted by the medical establishment, leading to widespread use of his methods throughout Europe, with him even receiving a medal from the French Emperor Napoleon I, whose country was at the time at war with Britain.

Answer: Charles Darwin

From 1831 to 1836, Charles Darwin undertook a voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle. Serving as a self-funded naturalist, Darwin undertook work surveying the geology and natural history of the areas visited, while the ship itself was engaged on its mission to survey and chart coastlines. Upon his return to England, Darwin set about the work of organising the collections he had built, and writing up the notes he had taken for presentation and publication. Following the presentation of his first geological paper, he presented the animal specimens he had collected to the Zoological Society, after which ornithologist John Gould noted that a number of the small birds from the Galapagos Islands off the west coast of South America, that Darwin had identified as 'wrens, blackbirds and slightly differing finches' were in fact 11 different previously undiscovered species of finch, each adapted to its surroundings.

It was from the idea that plants and animals adapted themselves to their environment that Darwin began to develop his concept of natural selection, a theory he developed over the next twenty years, which led to the publication of his work "On the Origin of Species" in 1859.

Answer: Frank Whittle

In 1926, Frank Whittle, then an aircraft apprentice in the Royal Air Force, was selected for officer training at RAF Cranwell. In addition to his training as a pilot, one of the requirements for passing the course was the submission of a thesis. Whittle wrote his piece on future aircraft developments, particularly in regard to high speed and high altitude flight, in which he proposed the use of a 'motorjet' - a piston engine providing compressed air to a chamber whose exhaust was used for extra thrust. Continuing to think about his concept after leaving Cranwell, he focused on the idea of using a turbine rather than a piston engine, which would be much lighter.

In 1930, having had no interest in the concept from the Air Ministry, Whittle instead patented the idea of what came to be called the turbojet.

As part of Whittle's service in the RAF, he took the Officers' Engineering Course, which led to a place on an engineering degree programme at Cambridge University. It was while at Cambridge that he helped set up Power Jets Ltd, a private concern to fund and develop Whittle's turbojet technology. By 1938, the Air Ministry had taken more of an interest in Whittle's design, and agreed to put funding into the project, while in 1940, they placed a contract with the Gloster Aircraft Company for a test aircraft to be powered by the engine.

The first British jet powered aircraft, the Gloster E.28/39, flew in May 1941.

Answer: JJ Thomson

Although many scientists had suggested that atoms were made up of smaller, more fundamental, particles, these were originally believed to be the size of a hydrogen atom. In 1897, Joseph John Thomson discovered the existence of a particle much smaller than an atom.

While investigating the properties of cathode rays, he discovered that they could travel much further through the air than might be expected for an atom sized particle. Through his observations, he was able to estimate that cathode rays were up to 1000 times lighter than a hydrogen atom, and that their mass was the same no matter which atom they came from. From this, he concluded that cathode rays were made up of very small, negatively charged particles that were a building block for atoms. Thomson called these new particles 'corpuscles', although this was later changed to 'electron', a word that had been suggested by physicist George Johnstone Stoney, who had first theorised the idea of a particle smaller than an atom in 1874.

Answer: Ernest Rutherford

During his time at Cambridge University, Ernest Rutherford undertook research into the concept of radioactivity, initially building on the work done by Henri Becquerel on uranium. In 1899, having moved to McGill University in Canada, his research led him to coin the terms 'alpha ray' and 'beta ray' to describe the two distinct types of radiation given off.

As part of this work, he discovered that thorium gave off a gas that had an emanation which was also radioactive, and that a sample of this material took the same time for half of it to decay, which gave rise to the concept of the 'half-life'. Working with chemist Frederick Soddy, Rutherford concluded that the emanation was an inert gas (identified as an isotope of radon). Rutherford's conclusions were eventually published as the "Law of Radioactive Change", which showed that atoms were not indestructible, and that radioactivity involved the spontaneous breaking down of atoms into some form of unidentified matter.

Answer: Alexander Fleming

In 1928, Alexander Fleming was working at St Mary's Hospital in London researching antibacterial substances, specifically looking at the properties of the Staphylococcus bacteria. Before leaving for a family holiday, he had inoculated a number of staphylococci cultures, which he had left in the corner of his laboratory. On his return, he noticed one of the cultures had been contaminated by a fungus, which had not affected the others. On closer examination, he noted that the staphylococci colonies surrounding the fungal growth had been destroyed, while others in the same culture but further from the fungus were unaffected. Identifying the fungus as belonging to the Penicillium genus, Fleming grew a pure culture of the fungal growth and discovered that it had an antibacterial effect on not just staphylococci, but other disease causing pathogens. Fleming published his findings in 1929, although little attention was paid, and Fleming himself suggested that his discovery, which he named 'penicillin', would not prove to be important in the treatment of infection, owing to the difficulty of producing enough of it.

It was only in the 1930s, after Fleming had largely abandoned work on penicillin, that work was undertaken to try and mass produce the substance, funded by both the British and US governments. Mass production of penicillin began following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and led to enough being produced by 1944 to treat all of the wounded in the Allied forces.

Answer: Charles Babbage

In 1812, Charles Babbage, then a student at Cambridge University, realised that the mathematical tables that were then used to inform calculations in mathematics, engineering and the sciences, were prone to errors as they were produced by hand. He saw the possibility of introducing mechanisation into the process of calculating these tables.

In 1822, he came up with a design for what he called a 'difference engine', which could be used to calculate values automatically. This initial design was followed up by what he called the 'Analytical Engine', which differed in that it used punch cards to enter written programs into the device, which would then be used to control the calculations.

Although the Analytical Engine was never built in full, the concept is described as being the first genuinely programmable computer, and a precursor to all modern computers.