Who invented the telephone?

Antonio Meucci.
An erratic, sometimes brilliant Florentine inventor, Meucci arrived in the United States in 1850. In 1860
he first demonstrated a working model of an electric device he called the teletrofono. He filed a caveat
(a kind of stopgap patent) in 1871, five years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent.

In the same year, Meucci fell ill after he was badly scalded when the Staten Island ferry’s boiler
exploded. Unable to speak much English, and living on charity, he failed to send the $10 required to
renew his caveat in 1874.

When Bell’s patent was registered in 1876, Meucci sued. He’d sent his original sketches and working
models to the lab at Western Union. By an extraordinary coincidence, Bell worked in the very same lab,
and the models had mysteriously disappeared.
Meucci died in 1889, while his case against Bell was still under way. As a result, it was Bell, not Meucci,
who got the credit for the invention. In 2004 the balance was partly redressed by the U.S. House of
Representatives, which passed a resolution that “the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be
recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.”
Not that Bell was a complete fraud. As a young man he did teach his dog to say “How are you,
grandmamma?” as a way of communicating with her when she was in a different room. And he made the
telephone a practical tool.
Like his friend Thomas Edison, Bell was relentless in his search for novelty. And, like Edison, he wasn’t
always successful. His metal detector failed to locate the bullet in the body of the stricken President
James Garfield. It seems Bell’s machine was confused by the president’s metal bedsprings.
Bell’s foray into animal genetics was driven by his desire to increase the numbers of twin and triplet
births in sheep. He noticed that sheep with more than two nipples produced more twins. All he managed
to produce was sheep with more nipples.
On the plus side, he did help to invent a hydrofoil, the HP 4, which set the world water-speed record of
70.84 mph in 1919, which stood for ten years. Bell was eighty-two at the time and wisely refused to
travel in it.
Bell always referred to himself first and foremost as a teacher of the deaf. His mother and wife were
deaf, and he taught the young Helen Keller. She dedicated her autobiography to him.

Who invented the steam engine?

a. James Watt
b. George Stephenson
c. Richard Trevithick
d. Thomas Newcomen

e. A Heron from Egypt
Heron (sometimes called Hero) takes the prize, some sixteen hundred years before Newcomen’s engine
of 1711.
Heron lived in Alexandria aroundA.D . 62, and is best known as a mathematician and geometer. He was
also a visionary inventor, and his aeolopile (wind ball) was the first working steam engine. Using the
same principle as jet propulsion, a steam-driven metal sphere spun around at 1,500 rpm. Unfortunately
for Heron, no one was able to see its practical function, so it was considered nothing more than an
amusing novelty.
Amazingly, had Heron but known it, the railway had already been invented seven hundred years earlier
by Periander, tyrant of Corinth. Called the Diolkos (slipway), it ran for four miles across the isthmus of
Corinth in Greece, and consisted of a roadway paved with limestone blocks in which were cut parallel
grooves five feet apart. Trolleys ran along these tracks, on to which ships were loaded. These were
pushed by gangs of slaves, forming a sort of land canal that offered a shortcut between the Aegean and
the Ionian seas.
The Diolkos was in use for some some fifteen hundred years until it fell into disrepair aroundA.D . 900.
The principle of railways was then completely forgotten about for almost another five hundred years, until
people had the idea of using them in mines in the fourteenth century.
The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote a brilliant essay speculating what would have happened if the two
inventions had been combined to create a global Greek empire, based on a fast rail network, Athenian
democracy, and a Buddhist-style religion founded on the teachings of Pythagoras. He briefly mentions a
failed prophet who lived at 4 Railway Cuttings, Nazareth.
Heron also invented the vending machine—for four drachmas you got a shot of holy water—and a
portable device to ensure that no one else could drink the wine you brought along to a bottle party.

What is Croatia’s most lasting contribution to world business?

The necktie.
Hravatis the Croatian word for “Croat” and it’s where we get the word cravat. So Croatia means “tie
land.”
In the seventeenth century, Louis XIII of France kept a regiment of Croatian mercenaries during the
Thirty Years War. Part of their uniform was a broad, brightly colored neck cloth by which they became
known. The flamboyant yet practical style became very popular in Paris, where military dress was much
admired.
During the reign of Louis XIV, the cravat was replaced by a more restrained military steinkirk , tied
about the neck in a loose knot, but it wasn’t until the reintroduction of the flowing cravat by dandies (or
“macaroni” as they were then known) in the late eighteenth century that individual styles of tying them
became popular, the generic name then changing to “tie.”
The relentless march of the tie through the twentieth century has made it the de rigueur dress item for
men in all but the most casual of businesses. Bremer Communication, a U.S. image consultancy, has
divided the now ubiquitous “business casual” into three levels: basic, standard, and executive. Only at the
basic level is a tie not required, and they recommend that this is best restricted to “those days when you
have little customer contact or are taking part in an informal activity.”
In the late 1990s two researchers at Cambridge University used mathematical modeling to discover that
it is topologically possible to tie eighty-five different knots with a conventional tie. They found that, in
addition to the four well-known knots, six other knots produced aesthetically pleasing results.

Where did Marco Polo come from?

Croatia.
Marco Polo (or Mark Chicken, in English) was born Marko Pilí c in Korcula, Dalmatia, in 1254, then a
protectorate of Venice.
We shall probably never know whether he really went to the Far East as a seventeen-year-old with his
merchant uncles or if he simply recorded the tales of Silk Road traders who stopped off at their Black
Sea trading post.
What is certain is that his famous book of travels was largely the work of a romance writer called
Rustichello da Pisa, with whom he shared a cell after being captured by the Genoans in 1296. Polo
dictated it; Rustichello wrote it in French, a language Polo didn’t speak.
The result, which appeared in 1306, was designed to entertain, and it became a best seller in the era
before printing. As an accurate history its status is less secure.

Its original title was Il Milione (the million) for reasons that are now obscure, although it quickly became
nicknamed “the million lies,” and Polo—now a rich and successful merchant—was known as “Mr
Million.” It was probably just a catchy thirteenth-century version of a title, like Wonder Book of
Wonders. No original manuscripts survive.
Marco Polo is also supposed to have brought pasta and ice cream to Italy.
In fact, pasta was known in Arab countries in the ninth century and dried macaroni is mentioned in
Genoa in 1279, twenty-five years before Polo claimed to have returned. According to the food historian
Alan Davidson, the myth itself only dates back as far as 1929, when it was mentioned in an American
pasta-trade journal.
Ice cream may well be a Chinese invention, but it seems unlikely to have been introduced to the West by
Polo, as it doesn’t get mentioned again until the middle of the seventeenth century.

What man-made artifacts can be seen from the moon?

Deduct ten points if you said the Great Wall of China.
No human artifacts at all can be seen from the moon with the naked eye.
The idea that the Great Wall is the only man-made object that can be seen from the moon is
all-pervasive, but it confuses the moon with space.
Space is quite close. It starts about 60 miles from the earth’s surface. From there, many artificial objects
are visible: motorways, ships on the sea, railways, cities, fields of crops, and even some individual
buildings.
However, at an altitude of only a few thousand miles after leaving the earth’s orbit, no man-made
objects are visible at all. From the moon—more then 250,000 miles away—even the continents are
barely visible.
And, despite Trivial Pursuit telling you otherwise, there is no point in between the two where only the
Great Wall of China is visible.

How many galaxies are visible to the naked eye?

Five thousand? Two million? Ten billion?
The answer is four—although from where you are sitting, you can only see two; and one of those is the
Milky Way (the one we’re in).
Given that there are estimated to be more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each containing
between 10 and 100 billion stars, it’s a bit disappointing. In total, only four galaxies are visible from earth
with the naked eye, only half of which can be seen at once (two from each hemisphere). In the Northern
Hemisphere, you can see the Milky Way and Andromeda (M31), while in the Southern Hemisphere you
can see the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
Some people with exceptional eyesight claim to be able to see three more—M33 in Triangulum, M81 in
Ursa Major, and M83 in Hydra—but it’s very hard to prove.
The number of stars supposedly visible to the naked eye varies wildly, but everyone agrees that the total
is substantially less than 10,000. Most amateur-astronomy computer software uses the same database: it
lists 9,600 stars as “naked-eye visible.” But no one really believes this figure. Other estimates vary from
around 8,000 down to fewer than 3,000.
It used to be said that there were more cinemas (around 5,200) in the former Soviet Union than there
are stars visible in the night sky.
At the Canadian website www.starregistry.ca you can have a star named after yourself or a friend for
$98 CDN (or $175 CDN with a framed certificate). They list 2,873 stars as being visible to the naked
eye. None of these are available, as they already have historical or scientific names.

What’s the most dangerous animal that has ever lived?

Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by
female mosquitoes (the males only bite plants).
Mosquitoes carry more than a hundred potentially fatal diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, dengue
fever, encephalitis, filariasis, and elephantiasis. Even today, they kill one person every twelve seconds.
Amazingly, nobody had any idea that mosquitoes were dangerous until the end of the nineteenth century.
In 1877 the British doctor Sir Patrick Manson—known as “Mosquito” Manson—proved that
elephantiasis was caused by mosquito bites.

Seventeen years later, in 1894, it occurred to him that malaria might also be caused by mosquitoes. He
encouraged his pupil Ronald Ross, then a young doctor based in India, to test the hypothesis.
Ross was the first person to show how female mosquitoes transmit the Plasmodium parasite through
their saliva. He tested his theory using birds. Manson went one better. To show that the theory worked
for humans, he infected his own son, using mosquitoes carried in the diplomatic bag from Rome.
(Fortunately, after an immediate dose of quinine, the boy recovered.)
Ross won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902. Manson was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society, knighted, and founded the London School of Tropical Medicine.
There are 2,500 known species of mosquito; 400 of them are members of the Anopheles family, and, of
these, 40 species are able to transmit malaria.
The females use the blood they suck to mature their eggs, which are laid on water. The eggs hatch into
aquatic larvae, or wrigglers. Unlike most insects, the pupae of mosquitoes, known as tumblers, are active
and swim about.
Male mosquitoes hum at a higher pitch than females: they can be sexually enticed by the note of a
B-natural tuning fork.
Female mosquitoes are attracted to their hosts by moisture, milk, carbon dioxide, body heat, and
movement. Sweaty people and pregnant women have a higher chance of being bitten.
Mosquitomeans “small fly” in Spanish and Portuguese.