Inventions & Discoveries Test - 1

The Hungarian brothers, Laszlo and George Biro, made the first ball point pen in 1894. It followed the first workable fountain pen which was invented by L.E. Waterman in 1884.

On September 12, 1958, Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working IC while working for Texas Instruments, although the U.S. patent office awarded the first patent for an integrated circuit to Robert Noyce of Fairchild.

John Boyd Dunlop, a veterinary surgeon, invented the pneumatic tyre in 1887.

Various authors have credited the invention of the thermometer to Cornelius Drebbel, Robert Fludd, Galileo Galilei or Santorio Santorio. The thermometer was not a single invention, however, but a development.

Galileo Galilei also discovered that objects (glass spheres filled with aqueous alcohol) of slightly different densities would rise and fall, which is nowadays the principle of the Galileo thermometer (shown). Today such thermometers are calibrated to a temperature scale.

Richter was born on an Ohio farm in 1900. He died in 1985.

Joseph F. Glidden was born in New York on Jan. 18, 1812. He invented barbed wire in 1873 and was granted the patent on Nov. 24, 1874. After a three year battle over the patent, which he eventually won, Gidden became known as the "Father of Barbed Wire ".

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 - July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801-1809) and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776).

Invented in 1765.

The village of Branston is in Staffordshire, just south of Burton-on-Trent.