Ohio: Full of Surprises Trivia Quiz

Answer:

In 1879, a saloon owner from Dayton, Ohio, named James Ritty kept noticing that his bartenders were pocketing the cash instead of putting it in the drawer. While taking a steamboat trip to Europe, he watched a mechanical device that counted the rotations of the ship's propeller and had an idea to help him. Back home, he designed a machine that used keys to type in an amount and a clicking dial to lock the transaction in place, inventing the world's very first mechanical cash register to keep his employees honest and his business safe from embezzlement.

In 1907, a janitor from Canton, Ohio, named Murray Spangler was dealing with a frustrating problem: sweeping up the heavy dust at the store where he worked was triggering his severe asthma. Determined to find a cleaner way to work, he rigged up a makeshift machine using an electric fan motor, a wooden box, a broom handle, and a velvet pillowcase to trap the dirt. It worked beautifully, creating the world's first portable electric vacuum cleaner. He soon sold it to his cousin's husband named William Hoover, who turned it into a household icon.

In the 1930s, a Cincinnati company called Kutol Products invented a soft putty designed to wipe away the messy black soot that coal heaters left on household wallpaper. By the 1950s, people were switching to cleaner gas heating, and the company's wallpaper cleaner was on the brink of becoming obsolete. That's when the owner's sister-in-law, a nursery school teacher, noticed that kids loved molding the dough into shapes. The company quickly took out the detergent, added bright dyes and a distinct almond scent, and successfully turned it into Play-Doh.

In 1931, Toni Morrison was born in the steel town of Lorain, Ohio. Before writing her own books, she made history as the first Black female editor for fiction at Random House. Later, she created her 1987 masterpiece, "Beloved", a haunting novel set in Cincinnati based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an escaped enslaved woman who made the agonizing choice to kill her own baby rather than let the child be captured. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and helped Morrison become the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1946. Before he became a household name, he was a young director taking a gamble on a movie set in Massachusetts. That was the 1975 thriller "Jaws", a movie about a great white shark that terrorizes a beach town. The result became a massive cultural hit, permanently changing how Hollywood released movies and officially inventing the concept of the modern summer blockbuster.

In the late 1800s, brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a successful bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, where they sold and repaired their own custom bike designs. They realized that an airplane, like a bicycle, would need a precise system of pilot control to stay balanced in the air. They engineered a revolutionary "three-axis control" system that allowed a pilot to actively steer an aircraft. While they famously traveled to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to test their invention and achieve the world's first powered, controlled flight in 1903, they returned home to Ohio to perfect their designs, ultimately opening America's very first airplane factory right in Dayton.

Ohio claims two of the most dominant athletes in modern sports history: basketball superstar Stephen Curry and gymnastics powerhouse Simone Biles. Curry was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1988 and he grew up to completely revolutionize the NBA with his amazing three-point shooting. Biles, an incredibly decorated gymnast, spent her early childhood in Columbus, Ohio, where she first discovered her love for the sport at a local gym field trip at just six years old.

In January 2017, the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden made headlines when a Nile hippopotamus named Bibi unexpectedly gave birth six weeks premature. The calf, named Fiona, weighed an incredibly tiny 29 pounds (13 kg). Too weak to stand or nurse on her own, she required around the clock critical care from a devoted team of keepers. By documenting her daily triumphs and struggles on social media, the zoo turned Fiona into a massive global phenomenon.

On December 22, 1956, history was made at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium when a western lowland gorilla named Colo was born, becoming the very first gorilla ever born in human care. She was raised by devoted zookeepers who fed her with bottles and even dressed her in clothes. Colo went on to live her entire life at the zoo, defying all normal life expectancies to celebrate her historic 60th birthday before passing away peacefully in her sleep in 2017.

Ohio's diverse forests and waterways are home to two fascinating wild animals: the eastern hellbender and the southern flying squirrel. The hellbender is the largest fully aquatic salamander in the United States, growing up to 2 feet (.6 m) long. It spends its entire life hiding under massive boulders in Ohio's rivers. Up in the hardwood forest canopy lives the southern flying squirrel, Ohio's most common yet least seen mammal. These tiny creatures are strictly nocturnal and use a specialized web of skin stretched between their wrists and ankles to glide silently from tree to tree.