I Made a Complicated Thing Simple Quiz

Answer: washboard

Workers had rubbed clothes against various hard objects to clean them for a long time before the more modern, recognizable form of the washboard, with its rectangular frame and wooden ridges, began to be manufactured in the 1800s. Later iterations replaced the wooden ridges with various types of metal or even glass.

When the first domestic automatic washing machine was introduced in 1937, the world of laundry was forever changed. Instead of a worker needing to boil water, soak the clothes, and scrub endlessly to remove dirt and other materials, one simply needed to put a load of clothes in the washing machine's tub, add soap, and let the machine do the work. Nowadays, these automatic models have been updated to have temperature controls, automatic timers, sensors, and even wireless functions that can send data directly to your phone.

Answer: map

Maps can be considered one of the earliest forms of human technology; one of the earliest known maps was found on a clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia, dating back over 4,000 years. Papyrus and paper maps came later, allowing for detailed drawings based on explorers' observations.

Paper maps were still the dominant form of navigation for most of the world until the 1990s, when satellite navigation systems began to be utilized by the public. The United States' version of satellite navigation, known as GPS, saw its first satellite launched in 1978 by the Department of Defense for military and governmental applications, but once the public got their hands on this technology, there was no going back. Other countries and groups have since developed their own satellite navigation systems, including the European Union, which launched the first satellite for its Galileo system in 2005.

Answer: floppy disk

As a teacher, a question I often get asked when my students are using a computer is, "Why does the save button look like that?" It is a question that ages me decades psychologically, but it is a good indication that the floppy disk, with its square shape, is a relic of technology's past.

Nowadays, portable storage devices are able to hold significantly more data while being much smaller. The standard 3.5 in. floppy disk (which was actually no longer floppy) held 1.44 MB of data, while specialized USB flash drive models in the mid-2020s were manufactured with a capacity of 4 TB. That is about 2.8 million times more.

Of course, with the advent of cloud technology and online data storage options such as Google Drive, people have become less reliant on portable computer storage devices.

Answer: steam locomotive

The earliest railways included tracks on which horses would pull cargo carts, allowing them to pull as much as seven times the load they could on ordinary roads. Once the steam locomotive came into common use in the early to mid-1800s, carrying capacity for cargo, as well as passengers, exploded. By utilizing combustion to heat water and produce steam, the steam locomotive drove several nations' expansion efforts and allowed people to travel farther and faster than ever before.

With the advent of bullet trains such as the Tokaido Shinkansen in 1964, high-speed rail has largely taken over as the fastest way to travel by conventional rail. Instead of a combustion engine, these systems generally use electricity to power them forward, which is why you often see wires hanging above the trains. Passenger steam locomotives varied greatly in speed, but many later services traveled at around 50 mph (80 km/h) or faster, while modern high-speed trains commonly operate at speeds of 155 mph (250 km/h) or more.

Another form of technology, known as maglev, is capable of even higher speeds than conventional high-speed trains and uses magnetic forces to lift and propel trains forward. While still limited in use, maglev trains have already started to shuttle passengers in several countries.

Answer: candlestick telephone

The candlestick telephone was not the first telephone design, but it was one that reliably served the public for decades. You might recognize this form of the telephone as standing in an upright position with a circular mouthpiece that you talked into and a heavy earpiece that was brought up to the ear for listening and was connected to the main phone stand by a thick wire. It was commonly used as early as the 1890s and stood the test of time as late as the 1940s. Desktop telephones with a new handset that combined the speaking and listening parts into one gradually replaced candlestick phones.

While telephones evolved swiftly from decade to decade, with push-button phones and bulky cellular phones being some of the iterations, the smartphone is now the dominant form of telecommunication around the world. And some users rarely use it for even that! In fact, a number of the technologies included in this quiz have been subsumed into the incredible device we call a smartphone.

Answer: videocassette

The videocassette is a type of videotape, the most popular format being VHS. It was played on a device called a VCR. Videocassettes allowed a full movie to be reliably played in the home. Entire industries, such as the video rental industry, were based around this technology. It even allowed users to record their favorite television programs as they aired on TV or to copy other VHS tapes if two VCRs were linked together.

Digital streaming services, on the other hand, do not rely on videotape to function, but deliver video directly from an online source to a streaming device. Before online streaming became practical, internet users often needed to download entire computer files before they could access the particular film they wanted to watch. With streaming, the computer continually receives and temporarily stores portions of the video as you watch. This process allows playback to begin much sooner because the entire file does not need to be downloaded first.

Answer: abacus

Most schoolchildren learn that the abacus was an early device for making calculations. Many countries developed their own versions, and they were a vital piece of ancient technology, remaining widely used in Europe as late as the 17th century.

Electronic calculators, utilizing semiconductors, were first popularized in the 1960s and 1970s. Capable of doing high-level math and plotting graphs, graphing calculators were introduced in the mid-1980s and became increasingly common in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These devices became a staple of high school math classes and early college courses. They became so advanced that some students even ported video games onto them.

Answer: dial-up

With the nostalgia-inducing sound of the modem revving up, dial-up internet used a telephone line to transfer data over long distances and allow it to be downloaded onto your home computer. In the process, the telephone line generally could not be used for normal telephone conversations, leading to the frustrating situation in many households in which one would have to stop using the internet if another person wanted to use the telephone.

Broadband technology has all but replaced dial-up services in much of the world. Instead of relying on the limited data capacity and speeds of a dial-up connection, broadband internet allows for continuous, high-speed data transfer through technologies such as cable, fiber optics, DSL, or satellite links. Two advantages to this method of data transmission could be said to be its speed and accessibility. This has led to many countries expanding their broadband systems to allow their citizens access to the greater world.

Answer: incandescent bulb

The incandescent lightbulb creates light through the basic concept of heating something (in this case, a filament) until it glows. Finding the right materials to preserve that glow instead of having the filament quickly burn out was famously a process taken up by Thomas Edison and other inventors. Incandescent bulbs are still used today due to being relatively inexpensive to manufacture, though they are considerably less energy-efficient and shorter-lasting than other bulb types.

LED lights create light in a different way: they contain semiconductors that create light through the movement of electrons. Because these lights do not rely on heating a filament to produce light, they are more efficient. Much of the energy that goes into heating the filament of an incandescent bulb can instead be converted into visible light. If you're wondering where you might see these lights in public, they are commonly used in traffic lights and emergency exit signs.

Answer: typewriter

The typewriter was perhaps one of the more beautiful and elegant pieces of technology that we humans have been able to interact with. Typewriters allowed individuals to produce letters and manuscripts without having to write them by hand. This was both quicker and easier, but they weren't without their own faults, such as earlier models being unforgiving when it came to typing errors and the fact that they could break down regularly if they weren't given proper maintenance.

As computers became more widely used, one practical type of software that emerged was the word processor. It served a similar purpose to a typewriter, but text could be created and edited on a computer and then printed out. Word processors added various new functions as they evolved, such as the ability to change a text's size, font, and formatting.

When cloud technology and internet storage systems became more prominent, many online word processors began to appear, including Google Docs and Microsoft Word for the web. Writers can type on these word processors and have the data saved and displayed to others almost instantaneously, allowing for better group collaboration and co-writing than was generally possible when documents were stored only on an individual computer.