The 1770s in Science Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Gulf Stream

The Gulf Stream, called the Northeast Current before Franklin renamed it, is like a huge, powerful river in the ocean that tends to move ships off course or slow them down on the western crossing, conversely speeding them along when they are traveling northeast. Folger, who grew up on Nantucket Island off Massachusetts, was able to sketch out the track of the Gulf Stream from his experience on whaling ships that took advantage of the current rather than fighting against it. Franklin, who crossed the Atlantic eight times, had observed and recorded differences in temperature, color, and movement of seaweed that revealed the presence of the current. Franklin's immediate interest was in speeding mail delivery, because he had served as Postmaster General for the colonies; his advice was ignored by British mail packets, but the chart was used by the Americans and their French allies during the Revolutionary War. Copies of first editions of the chart were found in 1978 in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, a little over 200 years after they were first printed.

Answer: Steam engine

When James Watt obtained his patent for the steam engine in 1775, hundreds of Thomas Newcomen's "atmospheric engines" were being used in mines, and it was an assignment to repair a Newcomen engine that piqued Watt's interest in improving its efficiency.

In turn, Newcomen, whose engines began to be used in 1712, had to make a deal with Thomas Savery, because at the time Savery held a patent that applied to any machinery for pumping water out of mines. John Wilkinson, who was a force behind building the first iron bridge, provided a needed new technology, because his precision tooling was necessary to bore the hole in the cylinders used for Watt's new condenser that enabled the steam engine to be employed in numerous ways beyond pumping water from mines.

Others also worked on the technology of the steam engine before, during, and after those mentioned, so the simple question, "Who invented the steam engine?" can't be answered with just one name.

Answer: Longitude

Sailors could determine latitude (north to south) by observing the sun, but to figure out where on earth you are in longitude (east to west), it's necessary to decide on a fixed point, then determine the distance you have traveled from that point. Greenwich Naval Observatory became the fixed point, and each 15 degrees of longitude equals one hour of time. Up until the 1770s, sailors had to navigate by dead reckoning methods, like knots in lines, to estimate distance based on the ship's speed, or celestial navigation, using devices like the sextant and mathematical charts to measure angles and distances between the moon and other bodies in the night sky.

A monetary prize was offered by the British Parliament in 1714 for the invention of a timepiece that would keep precise measurements of time while holding up to the movement and extreme weather conditions of sea voyages.

These clocks were called marine chronometers. John Harrison spent his life developing this technology and received a portion of the prize and recognition for solving the problem of longitude only a few years before his death in 1776 at the age of 83.

Answer: Oxygen

By the 1770s, scientists were beginning to understand that air is a mixture and not an inseparable element, but the "phlogiston theory" held that the potential for fire resided in the substance that burned and that "dephlogisticated" air simply absorbed the phlogiston when combustion took place. Both the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele and the English experimenter Joseph Priestley isolated oxygen from the air in the early 1770s, but Priestley published his findings first and conducted varied experiments, showing that the sort of air that kept a mouse alive was also the kind that was involved when fire burned; he noted that plants replenished this part of the air while animals depleted it. Earlier, Priestley had learned how to make carbonated water, using the "dead air" (carbon dioxide) that lingered around brewery vats as fermentation took place. The French scientist Antoine Lavoisier knew of the earlier experiments when he replicated them, and his contribution was not the discovery of oxygen (although he claimed it) but the insight that oxygen was an element essential to combustion and to life, rather than a passive consumer of the theoretical "phlogiston" that didn't actually exist.

Answer: Saltpeter

Gunpowder (black powder) is made from charcoal (mostly carbon), sulphur (also called brimstone), and saltpeter (potassium nitrate), with six parts of saltpeter to one part for each of the other two ingredients. Potassium nitrate is a compound of potassium, nitrogen, and oxygen (which Lavoisier came to learn was the element that made combustion possible). David Cressy's book "Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder", published by Oxford University Press in 2013, describes centuries of mutual dependence between science and politics when it comes to this particular ingredient necessary to make guns and cannons work. Rulers hired workers called "petermen" to dig under outhouses and stables to find the needed ingredients - dried excrement, urine, and other unsavory organic matter - and financed explorers who sought out cave floors and other places where deposits had piled up over many years.

In 1775, Antoine Lavoisier was appointed by King Louis XVI of France to oversee the manufacture of gunpowder in a scientific way, and Lavoisier made the process efficient through accurate measurement and careful research and observation at every stage of the complicated process.

In a year's time, France went from a shortage of saltpeter to an excess that could be sold to foreign powers, like the American colonies, who were by then engaged in the American Revolutionary War. Less than twenty years later, Lavoisier, a nobleman whose studies and work were sponsored by the king, would be executed by French revolutionaries.

Answer: Galaxies

There was a comet craze in the 1770s, and Charles Messier was obsessed with comets. To tag all those pesky, fuzzy things in the sky that were easily confused with comets, using the imperfect telescopes of the time, Messier identified 110 objects that are now classified as nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies (each with subcategories). Nebulae (plural of nebula) are clouds of dust or gas; star clusters, which can be globular or open, are groups of stars reaching light years across, bound together by gravity; galaxies are made up of stars and other objects, dust, and gas orbiting a center of gravity. Galaxies may be elliptical, spiral, or irregular. Even though astronomers have identified many other deep sky objects, Messier's list is popular today, because the objects can be seen using amateur telescopes, and fans of the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere have marathons to see how many of the Messier objects they can see in one night.

Answer: Botany Bay

Botany is the scientific study of plants, so Captain Cook settled on the name "Botanist Bay" and later "Botany Bay" in honor of botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, who with their assistants collected and recorded 132 new plant specimens in eight days at this one landfall in 1770, just south of what is now Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. (On their complete voyage around the world, they collected 30,000 specimens, including 1400 species that were formerly unknown to science.) Sydney Parkinson, a young man who died later on the voyage, was Banks's botanical artist, and his sketches, color often only partially filled in in the interests of speed, form the basis of the collection of pictures documenting the voyage. Both Banks and Solander used the taxonomy system devised by Carl Linneaus, who had been Solander's teacher in Sweden, a system of classification still widely used and familiar to most of us from school. Sir Joseph Banks served as President of the Royal Society from 1772 until his death in 1820.

Answer: Flush toilet

The idea of using running water to move waste out of the house is an ancient idea, with archaeological evidence going back to the Indus River valley civilizations of 4000 BC and later Egyptian, Greek, and Roman use of plumbing. Sir John Harington, who was a godson of Elizabeth I, is credited with inventing the first working flush toilet (nicknaming it "Ajax" because it was "a jakes") and having it installed in his Kelston Manor near Bath, England, sometime before 1592, when his godmother tried it out and let him place one in Richmond Palace a few years later. Harington's book "A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax" was less a scientific treatise than a satire that got the mischievous lord in trouble for insulting the Queen's favorite.

In the 1770s, Scottish clock maker, organ builder, and inventor Alexhander Cumming (also known as Alexander Cummings) was involved in many scientific endeavors, but his contribution to the improvement of the flush toilet, which he patented, was the S bend that protected the toilet itself and the surrounding air from odors and backwash.

In 1778, Joseph Bramah (working for an installer whose last name was Allen) obtained a patent for a flap that kept the toilet from freezing over, and a later improvement, the U bend, was introduced in 1880 by the famed Mr. Thomas Crapper, subject of an erroneous linguistic myth.

Answer: Caroline Herschel

The survivor of two life-threatening diseases, smallpox and typhus, Caroline Herschel was a little over four feet tall, but she became a giant of scientific inquiry and observation and a careful recorder of the precise data she and her brother, William Herschel, discovered first as amateur, later as professional, astronomers.

In the 1770s, when she first joined her brother, who was a musician in Bath, England, he had just become interested in acquiring and building telescopes (called "sweepers" because they were used to visually sweep across the skies).

The brother would climb onto the roof to sweep the night skies and shout his observations down to the sister, stationed at an open window to write them down, filling in the details the next day. William gained fame, along with a court astronomer appointment from King George III, for his discovery of the planet Uranus. Caroline wrote up William's discoveries, which were published by the Royal Society in "Philosophical Transactions"; but she became an astronomer and published scientific writer on her own and aided others in recording observations with appropriate coordinates. Like her French contemporary Charles Messier, Caroline was a meteor hunter, but unlike Messier, she was interested in nebulae and star clusters as more than simple distractions to comets, and her work on cataloging deep space objects was invaluable to future astronomers.

Answer: Submarine

Brenda Milkofsky's online article "David Bushnell and his Revolutionary Submarine" is a source worth looking up at connecticuthistory.org if you are interested in the scientific problem solving the inventor had to do before he could get his tiny vessel underwater and attempt to use it for planting mines to aid the patriot cause in 1770s America. (The idea of the submarine was not new, with Cornelius Drebbel keeping one submerged for three hours 15 feet under the surface of the Thames in the 1600s.) To put his technology to use, Bushnell had to have valves and chambers where the amount of water or air could be adjusted for submerging or raising the submarine from inside; he had to figure out what other ballast would stabilize it in the water so it didn't turn over; he had to coordinate propellers, treadles, and hand cranks to make it move through the water; he had to find a way to have enough light and air for an operator to be inside without drowning or suffocating; and he needed clockwork timing devices and striking mechanisms that would allow underwater explosions without killing the person setting them off and destroying the submarine.

After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to plant mines on the hulls of British ships in and around New York Harbor, Bushnell's turtle was a bit of a failure, and it is often ridiculed, but his efforts gained the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who was connected to more than one of the scientists in this quiz, General George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, who made his invention known to the public after the war. His underwater mines worked when delivered in other ways and were used successfully later in the Revolutionary War. David Bushnell's submersible is considered the prototype for submarines used by modern navies, and he has been called the father of submarine warfare.