Inventions, Discoveries and Nobel Laureates MCQs with Explanations

Gutenberg combined metal movable type, oil-based ink and a screw press at Mainz around 1440 to 1450, printing the 42-line Bible. Caxton, the tempting distractor, later brought the press to England in 1476, and Aldus Manutius pioneered italic type at Venice.

Watt's separate condenser, patented in 1769, avoided the wasteful repeated heating and cooling of the cylinder that limited Newcomen's atmospheric engine of 1712. Trevithick and Stephenson came later with high-pressure steam locomotives, and Savery's steam pump of 1698 preceded them all.

Bell's application, filed on 14 February 1876, was granted that March as the first US patent for the telephone; Elisha Gray filed a caveat for a similar apparatus on the same day. Antonio Meucci's earlier voice-communicating device is why the question of who 'really' invented the telephone stays a favourite trap.

Röntgen detected the unknown radiation he labelled 'X' while experimenting with cathode rays in 1895 and was awarded the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. Becquerel discovered spontaneous radioactivity in 1896 and shared the 1903 Physics Nobel with Pierre and Marie Curie.

Edward Jenner used material from a cowpox lesion in 1796, publishing his findings in 1798 and coining 'vaccine' from vacca, the Latin for cow, opening the road to smallpox eradication. Pasteur developed attenuated vaccines for chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies later in the nineteenth century.

Alexander Fleming observed in 1928 that a Penicillium mould was inhibiting bacterial growth and named the active substance penicillin. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain developed it into a usable drug, and the three shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Edison's long-lived high-resistance filament lamp at Menlo Park in 1879, together with his complete generation and distribution system, made electric lighting commercially viable, and Pearl Street began supplying power in 1882. Joseph Swan demonstrated a similar lamp in Britain, and Faraday's electromagnetic induction supplied the scientific basis for the dynamos.

Maurice Wilkins, who applied X-ray diffraction to DNA fibres at King's College London, shared the 1962 prize with Watson and Crick. Rosalind Franklin's diffraction data, including the famous Photo 51, was decisive to the double-helix model but she died in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.

Mendeleev arranged the elements by atomic weight and recurring properties in 1869 and predicted the 'eka' elements later found as gallium, scandium and germanium. Lothar Meyer produced a similar classification independently, but the predictive gaps are the reason the answer key credits Mendeleev.

Babbage's Analytical Engine paired a 'mill' for processing with a 'store' for numbers and punched-card input, the design of a programmable general-purpose machine. Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes on the engine contain what is widely described as the first published programme.

Sputnik 1, a polished sphere of about 58 cm diameter, entered orbit on 4 October 1957 and opened the space age. Explorer 1 was the first United States satellite in January 1958, Luna 1 the first probe to escape Earth's gravity in 1959, and Vostok 1 carried Yuri Gagarin as the first human in orbit in 1961.

Marie Curie took the 1903 Physics Nobel, shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, and then the 1911 Chemistry Nobel for her work on radium and polonium. Pauling (Chemistry 1954, Peace 1962), Sanger (Medicine 1958, Chemistry 1980) and Bardeen (Physics 1956 and 1972) all collected second prizes after her, so she was the first.

Salam's gauge-theory formulation completed the unified electroweak model of electromagnetic and weak interactions, recognised by the 1979 Physics Prize he shared with Glashow and Weinberg. He was the first Pakistani to win a Nobel Prize; quantum electrodynamics (1965) and the theory of superconductivity (1972) were recognised in separate prizes.

The 2014 Peace Prize went jointly to Malala Yousafzai, shot in 2012 for campaigning for girls' schooling, and to Indian children's-rights activist Kailash Satyarthi. At seventeen she became the youngest Nobel laureate in the history of the prizes; Ebadi won in 2003 and Suu Kyi in 1991, so both are year-traps.