I Hope Someday Trivia Quiz

Answer: Medicine

French physician René Laennec had skills at woodcarving that he used to carve wooden flutes, and this led to him inventing the first stethoscope in 1816 at the Hôpital Necker in Paris. He first rolled up a paper tube to listen to a patient's heartbeat, discovering that the internal sounds of the patient's body were louder and clearer with the device. This was upgraded to a solid wooden tube, of which stethoscopes continued to be comprised of until late in the 19th century when rubber tubing was developed. Lenneac's early design of the stethoscope was used in one ear only.

Stethoscope comes from Greek terms stethos (chest) and skopein (to examine). This tool that Lenneac introduced to mankind was used to study heart murmurs, lung sounds, and pneumonia. It even made tuberculosis diagnosable decades before the advent of x-rays. Before Laennec's contribution of the stethoscope, tuberculosis was often only diagnosed after death. But being able to identify cavitations, crackles, and changes in breathing with the stethoscope made early diagnosis possible for the first time.

Answer: Medicine

As with many inventions and inspirations, Willem Kolff's creation of the first dialysis machine is the result of wartime desperation combined with dedicated creativity - and the result led to millions of lives being saved. Working in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II, Kolff had virtually no access to medical supplies and built the first functional hemodialysis machine with improvised and salvaged items such as orange juice cans, a wooden drum, cellophane sausage casings, and a sewing machine motor. Talk about MacGyver. Willem Kolff courageously began the project of creating the dialysis machine when German forces took over the hospital he worked at, hiding Jewish patients and experimenting in secret.

Kolff didn't patent his invention, but gave it to the world for free, encouraging improvement on the life-saving design. Kolff later led the team at the University of Utah, mentoring student researcher Robert Jarvik who helped develop the Jarvik-7, the first artificial heart implanted in a human.

Answer: Medicine

In the 1940s, when Jonas Salk worked to develop the polio vaccine, most researchers believed only live viruses could trigger immunity, which Salk thought was unnecessary and dangerous. Salk insisted on using killed (inactivated) versions of the virus, against the admonition of many experts who claimed it would never work.

This approach ended up being safer, easier, and more effective to produce. Before any clinical trials, Salk vaccinated himself, his wife, and his three sons, wishing to demonstrate complete confidence in the safety of his method.

The 1954 field trial of Salk's polio vaccine involved 1.8 million children (who were nicknamed "Polio Pioneers") with 20,000 physicians and 200,000 volunteers contributing their efforts to this massive project.

Answer: Medicine

Before Charles Drew, blood that was donated only lasted a couple days before being useless. Drew discovered that separating plasma from whole blood extended storage time significantly. Plasma could be maintained for weeks, shipped long distances, and transfused safely. This insight made blood banking possible.

Drew's 1940 dissertation at Columbia, "Banked Blood: A Study in Blood Preservation", laid out how blood could be collected, stored, and transported safely, as well as a meticulous method to organize large-scale programs for donation. Charles Drew built the first large-scale blood bank during World War II when the British were bombed nightly and desperately needed blood. Charles Drew was the first medical director of the American Red Cross blood plasma program for the U.S. armed forces in 1941.

Answer: Environment

Building the first solar cell using selenium, not silicon, Charles Fritts invented a solution to a problem the world was largely unaware of at the time, preceding widespread use of power grids. Modern solar panels use silicon, but Fritts used thin layers of selenium coated with gold, because selenium was known to change electrical resistance when exposed to light, was cheap and easy to work with, and available in Victorian chemical shops. Such a cell produced electricity but at very little efficiency, albeit sufficiently enough to prove the concept worked.

Fritts mounted a set of selenium panels on a Manhattan building in the 1880s that produced a small, steady current - the first solar installation in U.S. history. Although solar power in the 1880s couldn't compete with coal-fired steam engines and Edison's expanding electrical grid, it started a renewable energy source and inspired future scientists in developing more efficient solar technologies.

Answer: Environment

Peter Morgan designed the Bush Pump to be repaired by anyone, not specialized engineers, making it one of the most sustainable water technologies ever developed. Morgan's Bush Pump (particularly the "B" type used in Zimbabwe) includes no specialized parts or proprietary fittings, and no need for factory tools so aside from a few major issues, repairs can be largely done with local materials. These pumps stay functional for decades since villagers can fix them on their own, and millions of people in Africa rely on Morgan's design every day.

Peter Morgan's efforts didn't stop at water - he created a series of eco-toilets that became global models and enhanced sanitation design throughout the developing world, as well as earning him the Stockholm Water Prize. His philosophy was 'technology must fit the village, not the other way around'.

Answer: Environment

Before Rachel Carson, scientists studied toxins mostly in terms of human poisoning and industrial hazards. Carson reframed the question to ask what happens when chemicals enter ecosystems, how do they move and accumulate, and how do they affect food webs? Basically creating the field of ecotoxicology, Carson introduced these crucial ideas to human thought. Carson documented how pesticides such as DDT didn't solely kill insects as intended, they also built up in soil and waterways, affecting animals like fish immediately as well as being magnified in predators such as hawks and eagles that rely on these animals for food. Her work was one of the earliest explanations of bioaccumulation (toxins building up in organisms) and biomagnification (toxins increasing up the food chain).

Rachel Carson's famous environmental book "Silent Spring" (1962) had early drafts that she considered titling "The War Against Nature", "Man Against the Earth", and "The Chemical Age". She decided on the ultimate title as it emotionally captured the concept of a spring without birdsong.

Answer: Environment

Dr. Mario Molina was a Mexican physical chemist who played a key role in saving the Earth's ozone layer. He is credited as a co-discoverer of the fact that man-made chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases destroy stratospheric ozone. This critical finding led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol and earned him the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Answer: Communication

Tim Berners-Lee's initial prototype of the World Wide Web wasn't meant to change the world so completely - it was a personal side project called "Enquire" in 1980. It was built at CERN to help Berners-Lee remember how different people, projects, and machines were connected. Kind of like a digital Rolodex. When Berners-Lee realized CERN, with its thousands of researchers and incompatible computer systems, had no way to share information, he realized a revolution in communication was desperately needed and the Web was his solution.

Berners-Lee's cleverness was in combining three components together: hypertext (clickable links), the Internet (that already existed), and a universal addressing system (URLs). The first webpage, developed in 1991, was a basic document describing the World Wide Web and how to create pages and link them - a website about websites.

Answer: Communication

Noam Chomsky's most radical idea was that language isn't learned from scratch, but built into the human brain. Grammar, to him, is part of human biology. Chomsky proposed that humans have an innate "language faculty" that biologically disposes humans to make language acquisition natural and universal, directly challenging behaviorism which posited language to be learned through imitation, conditioning and reinforcement. Chomsky showed that children learn language too quickly for behaviorists to explain, and his efforts helped create cognitive science as a discipline, influencing psychology, neuroscience, and computer science.

Answer: Communication

Efforts to help deaf people speak were what inspired Alexander Graham Bell's world-changing invention of the telephone. With a deaf mother and a deaf wife, as well as an early career in speech therapy and acoustics, Bell's life revolved around how the ear works, how vibrations travel, and how speech could be reproduced mechanically. The telephone was a product of Bell's passions for assisting in communication for people that lacked other certain typically available means. Bell modeled the telephone transmitter after the eardrum and the hammer and anvil bones, inspired by his efforts to help deaf people communicate, and using the way vibrations convert to neural signals. He believed the best way to transmit sound electrically was by imitating biology.

Alexander Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray in achieving the patent on the telephone by mere hours, with both filing for patents on the same day, February 14, 1876. Legal battles on the matter ensued for years.

Answer: Communication

Early scientists believed radio waves traveled in straight lines and couldn't bend around the Earth's curvature. Marconi, with no formal engineering education, refused to accept this notion, and experimented with increasing transmitter power, antenna height, and grounding systems until he proved long-distance transmission was possible.

From his stubborn insistence, Marconi was able to send the first wireless signal across the Atlantic ocean - simply the letter "S". His Morse code transmission of this single letter was transmitted in 1901, from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland, Canada. Received in Canada from a kite-lifted antenna, the signal was faint and barely audible, but shattered the belief that such communication was impossible. This innovation saved hundreds of lives during the Titanic disaster when the ship's distress signals were sent via Marconi's equipment.