Do What, John? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Fictional

John Darling is a fictional character - the middle child of the Darling family in "Peter Pan" by the Scottish novelist J M Barrie. The inspiration for the character came from John "Jack" Llewellyn Davies, whose family was known to the author. After the death of their parents, Barrie became the unofficial guardian of John and his brothers.

Answer: Fictional

Dr John Hammond is a fictional character from Michael Crighton's 1990 novel "Jurassic Park" and the subsequent film franchise of the same name. In the films Hammond, the owner of Jurassic Park, is portrayed as a jovial and benign, if somewhat misguided, character - almost the opposite of what was in the book, where he is a cold, sociopathic character almost entirely motivated by financial profit.

Answer: Fictional

Reluctant hero John McClane is the protagonist of the "Die Hard" film franchise: played by actor Bruce Willis, McClane is a hardboiled New York cop who unwittingly finds himself in dangerous situations that would probably kill most normal people - the character moves from an "ordinary guy" in the first film, "Die Hard" (1988) to unbelievably invincible in the fifth, "A Good Day to Die Hard" (2012).

Answer: Film Director

John Eliot Sturges (1910-1992) was an American film director known for many of what we now consider "classics" - "Gunfight at the OK Corral" (1957), "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), "The Great Escape" (1963), and "The Eagle Has Landed" (1976), to name but a few.

Born in Illinois USA, he began his Hollywood journey as an editor in 1932, and considered it the proudest moment of his career when the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa told him that he loved "The Magnificent Seven" (which was a reworking of Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai").

Answer: Film Director

John David Landis, born in Chicago, Illinois USA in 1950, began his Hollywood journey as a mail boy at 20th Century-Fox studios; in a varied career, he also worked as a runner, stunt double, dialogue coach, actor, production assistant, script writer - and probably a few other roles as well.

His many films include "The Blues Brothers" (1980), "Coming to America" (1988), and "Burke and Hare" (2010).

Answer: Film Director

John Marcellus Huston (1906-1987) was born in Nevada, Missouri USA. His father was actor Walter Huston, and his daughter is the actor Anjelica Huston. Huston also wrote many of the films that he directed, including "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), "The African Queen" (1951), and "The Man Who Would Be King" (1975).

Answer: Physicist

John Tyndall (1820-1893) was born in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland, and began his career as a draftsman for the Ordinance Survey of Ireland. Moving on to a teaching post at an English boarding school, his desire to further his knowledge of chemistry and physics lead to his enrolment at the University of Marburg in Germany in 1848, as British universities of the time were not noted for excellence in the sciences.

Although now mainly remembered for the phenomenon known as the Tyndall Effect - which is the scattering of a light beam shone through a suspension of fine particles, explaining (amongst other things) why the sky is blue - his experiments and research covered a wide range and included early observations on the role of carbon dioxide in the greenhouse effect.

He continued his commitment to teaching and furthering the understanding of science by giving many public lectures at the Royal Institution in London, which were always well-attended, as was an 1872 lecture tour in the United States.

Answer: Physicist

John Bardeen (1908-1991) was born in Madison, Wisconsin USA. He received his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and then pursued his interest in physics and mathematics, going on to work briefly as a geophysicist for Gulf Oil.

In 1945 he began to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories in a research group headed by William Shockley, and it was here that they invented the transistor which would go on to replace the vacuum tubes then used in devices such as televisions and radios. Shockley, Bardeen, and Walter Brattain were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for their semiconductor research and discovery of the transistor effect. Bardeen was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972 - jointly with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer - for the microscopic theory of superconductivity.

Answer: Physicist

John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) was born in Jacksonville, Florida USA. He is most noted for his work in the field of particle physics, studying nuclear fission with Nils Bohr and co-writing a paper that was published the same day that Germany invaded Poland in 1939. In 1942 Wheeler, like many prominent physicists of the time, joined the Manhattan Project, whose scientists and technicians researched and developed the first nuclear weapons.

His interest in particle physics, general relativity, and quantum physics continued throughout his career, and he is credited with coining the term "black hole" in 1968 to describe a region of space whose field of gravity is so intense that no radiation or matter escapes it.

Answer: Physician

John Snow (1813-1858) was born to a poor family in York, England. An aptitude for mathematics lead to a medical apprenticeship in Newcastle upon Tyne, followed by a move to London and subsequent admittance to the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians. He had a particular interest in anaesthesia, and it has been speculated that his premature death from a stroke in 1858 may have been related to overexposure to ether, chloroform, and other anaesthetics which are now known to have adverse heath effects.

He is particularly remembered for his involvement in the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London, England, when his meticulous approach to the epidemiology pinpointed the source as a contaminated water pump located in that street.

Answer: Physician

John Hunter (1728-1793) was born in Long Calderwood, in what is now the South Lanarkshire unitary authority of Scotland. He initially worked as an assistant to a cabinet maker, but a visit to his brother William, who was an anatomist in London, sparked John's interest and he became William's assistant.

His subsequent experiences and studies in Georgian London established him as a surgeon, and in 1776 he was appointed surgeon to King George III. He made many valuable contributions to medicine, including observations made while bloodletting patients suffering from different diseases that lead him to the theory that inflammation was the body's response to disease, and not a disease itself.

Answer: Physician

John Langdon Haydon Down (1828-1896) was born in Torpoint, Cornwall, England, and was apprenticed at age 14 to his father who was an apothecary in the nearby village of Anthony St Jacob's (now known as Antony). He became interested in becoming a doctor after an encounter in 1846 with a girl who showed the characteristics of what would later come to be known as Down Syndrome.

After his father's death in 1853 John became a medical student, qualifying in 1856, and was appointed Medical Superintendent at Earlswood Asylum in 1858. At that time, most asylums were brutal institutions, often dirty and disease-ridden, where patients' dignity was disregarded and corporal punishment was common - inmates were regarded as insane, deranged and somehow subhuman. John and his wife Mary, appalled by the inhumane practices, set about transforming Earlswood by introducing occupational training, craft activities, and by forbidding punishment.

During his lifetime John Down published many observations on developmental and intellectual disabilities and their possible causes, including the first published description of Prader-Willi syndrome and observations on people with the chromosomal abnormality now known as Down syndrome.