With school back in session, it’s time to test your memory of scientific discoveries and inventions you probably first learned about in a classroom. The answers appear below.
1. What did Alexander Fleming accidentally discover in 1928 when he returned from vacation to find mold growing in a petri dish?
2. Who laid the groundwork for modern physics in 1867 when he published Principia Mathematica including his three laws of motion?
3. Who created the first practical, long-lasting and affordable electric light bulb using a carbonized cotton thread for the filament?
4. What did the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev create that organized elements by their atomic weight and characteristics?
5. Whose discovery of radioactivity would eventually win her the Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry?
6. Whose mother and wife were both deaf, spurring his interest in sound technology and leading to the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876?
7. What German-born physicist is credited with the theory of relativity as well as the “world’s most famous equation”?
8. What field did Gregor Mendel establish with his groundbreaking work on inheritance, particularly his experiments with pea plants?
9. Who claimed credit for the invention of the mechanical reaper and went on to establish the company that eventually merged to become International Harvester?
10. What modern convenience was first discovered in 1945 when an American engineer noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted during his magnetron experiments?
11. Who refused to get a patent for the first successful polio vaccine because he wanted everyone to have access to it?
12. What English scientist developed the world’s first vaccine when he used cowpox to protect against small pox?
ANSWERS:
1. Penicillin
2. Isaac Newton
3. Thomas Edison
4. Periodic Table
5. Marie Curie
6. Alexander Graham Bell
7. Albert Einstein
8. Genetics
9. Cyrus McCormick
10. Microwave
11. Jonas Salk
12. Edward Jenner
