Technology history quiz

Posted on by John

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:

  1. The computer mouse
  2. Radio frequency identification (RFID)
  3. Pull-top cans
  4. Bar codes
  5. Touch tone phones
  6. Cell phones
  7. Car airbags
  8. Automated teller machines (ATM)
  9. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
  10. Latex paint

Now the years:

  1. 1948
  2. 1952
  3. 1953
  4. 1963
  5. 1968
  6. 1969
  7. 1973
  8. 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

6 thoughts on “Technology history quiz”

  2. John

    I might have gotten zero out of ten. I can’t say since of course I made the quiz after I knew the answers.

  3. Gene Harris

    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.

  5. 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.

  6. ezra abrams

    I work at Cummings Center, Beverly MA, a 20 acre, million square foot site that for many years was home to the United Shoe Manufacturing Company, which made most, if not all of the automation machinery used to make shoes in the western world.
    USMC was a huge company, and a giant innovator; I believe one of their last things was the pull top soda can.
    a good intro: http://www.cummings.com/history.html
    When it was a going concern, special trains brought workers from boston; in that sense, society has gone backward, cause now each person drives in a car, causing the environment harm
    on the other hand, the USMC had its own foundry; one can only imagine the air pollution.

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