I was skimming through Big Ideas: 100 Modern Inventions the other day and was surprised at the dates for many of the inventions. I thought it would be fun to pick a few of these and make them into a quiz, so here goes.
Match the following technologies with the year of their invention.
First the inventions:
- The computer mouse
- Radio frequency identification (RFID)
- Pull-top cans
- Bar codes
- Touch tone phones
- Cell phones
- Car airbags
- Automated teller machines (ATM)
- Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
- Latex paint
Now the years:
- 1948
- 1952
- 1953
- 1963
- 1968
- 1969
- 1973
- 1977
Two of the years are used twice. Quiz answers here.
All examples taken from Big Ideas: 100 Modern Inventions That Have Transformed Our World
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
mat roberts 01.14.10 at 05:46
zero out of ten – I rule
John 01.14.10 at 05:51
I might have gotten zero out of ten. I can’t say since of course I made the quiz after I knew the answers.
Gene Harris 01.15.10 at 14:07
I made zero out of 10.
I was a graduate student at UAB in 1974. I remember receiving a tiny amount of animal tissue from a surgery. We ground the material into a solution using DMSO as the solvent. I ran an NMR on the material at room temperature. The signal was just a giant glob on the graph paper. I wondered whether anyone would ever get anything useful out of NMR on human tissue because of the high concentration of water.
Several months (or a year) later at a regional ACS meeting in Charleston, another investigator showed us his results. They were only slightly more refined than my results. (Bigger, better, stronger magnet.)
Couple of years later some whiz bangs out of California (can’t remember who) showed us some visual renderings they were able to produce by interpreting the signals in more than one dimension.
All I can remember is the early work wasn’t nearly as promising as the final results of today’s instrumentation.
John 01.15.10 at 14:10
Gene, very interesting.
BruceA 01.15.10 at 16:47
The only one I knew for sure was the mouse, which I knew was invented the year I was born. And yet I can remember a time when nobody used mice. Not one of these technologies seems as old as it really is.