100 Fun Facts About Science and Technology

Which singer's name went to the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, a Scottish sheep born in 1996?

Dolly Parton got the honour because the clone grew from a mammary gland cell, as the Roslin Institute team cheerfully admitted. The lamb was born on 5 July 1996 in Midlothian.

Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century king, whose runic initials make up the Bluetooth logo, of which country?

Denmark's King Harald Bluetooth united its squabbling tribes into one kingdom, so Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the name in 1997 to suggest uniting rival wireless protocols.

Which item was eBay's first sale in 1995, going for $14.83 to a buyer who collected that kind of thing?

A broken laser pointer went to a bidder who told founder Pierre Omidyar 'I'm a collector of broken laser pointers', settling his worry that the buyer had misread the listing.

The world's first webcam, set up at the University of Cambridge in 1991, kept watch over what?

A coffee pot in the Trojan Room was filmed so people elsewhere in the building would not trek over to find it empty; the pot later fetched £3,350 at auction.

Which two-word greeting was the first SMS, sent from a computer to a Vodafone phone in December 1992?

Merry Christmas was typed on a computer by 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth on 3 December 1992 and reached Vodafone director Richard Jarvis's Orbitel 901 while he was at his office Christmas party.

Which puzzle game came bundled with the Game Boy when it reached North America in 1989?

Tetris became the pack-in after Henk Rogers told Nintendo of America's Minoru Arakawa that a Mario game would sell the Game Boy to young boys, but this one would sell it to everyone.

Which Swedish botanist is credited with flipping Anders Celsius's scale, which first put boiling at 0 and freezing at 100?

Carl Linnaeus had a thermometer built for his Uppsala greenhouses with the scale the modern way up, and his December 1745 report is the first known Swedish record of it.

Which Hollywood actress co-patented a frequency-hopping guidance system for torpedoes in 1942?

Hedy Lamarr worked it out with composer George Antheil, borrowing the synchronised rolls of a player piano to make the transmitter and torpedo switch frequencies in step.

At which company did Steven Sasson build the first digital camera in 1975, saving each shot to cassette tape?

Kodak sat on the 100-by-100-pixel prototype, which weighed 8 pounds and took 23 seconds to write each image, and did not disclose it publicly until 2000.

Which nursery rhyme did Thomas Edison recite into his tinfoil phonograph in 1877 as its first test?

Mary Had a Little Lamb, recited onto a tinfoil cylinder, counts as the first recorded verse, though that 1877 recording was never preserved and a 1927 re-enactment is often mistaken for it.

Which 1979 Sony cassette player grew from co-founder Masaru Ibuka's wish for music on business trips?

Walkman was judged such bad English that early exports went out as the Sound-about in the US and the Stowaway in Britain before the Japanese name won everywhere.

Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk in 1973 for which company?

Motorola's Cooper dialled his rival Joel Engel at AT&T and told him he was calling from 'a real handheld portable cell phone', a 2.5-pound DynaTAC that was later dubbed 'the brick'.

Which Japanese company created VHS, the videotape format that beat Sony's Betamax by recording for longer?

JVC, then a Matsushita subsidiary, launched VHS in 1976, a year after Betamax, and Matsushita backed it because it saw Betamax's one-hour recording limit as a weakness.

Bitcoin's creator published its white paper in 2008 under which pseudonym?

Satoshi Nakamoto embedded a Times headline about a second bank bailout in Bitcoin's first block in January 2009, and the name's real owner has never been publicly confirmed.

The word 'wiki', which Ward Cunningham took from a Honolulu airport shuttle bus in 1995, is Hawaiian for what?

Quick is the meaning: Cunningham recalled the Wiki Wiki Shuttle between Honolulu airport's terminals and chose 'wiki-wiki' so he would not have to call his site 'quick-web'.

Masahiro Hara of Denso Wave invented the QR code in Japan in 1994 to keep track of what?

Car parts at Denso's factories needed a label that held far more than a barcode, and Hara's square pattern was inspired by the black and white stones on a Go board.

Which ship took Charles Darwin on a survey voyage, billed as two years, that lasted almost five from 1831?

HMS Beagle's captain Robert FitzRoy wanted someone aboard to investigate geology, and the 22-year-old Darwin, planning to become a parson, took the berth and saw the Galápagos.

Albert Einstein was a clerk in which Swiss city's patent office when he published special relativity in 1905?

Bern's patent office took Einstein on after he had spent almost two years failing to land a teaching post, and he wrote the papers of his 1905 'miracle year' there in his spare time.

Which 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim beside two elephants was the first video uploaded to YouTube in 2005?

Me at the zoo was shot at the San Diego Zoo by Karim's high-school friend Yakov Lapitsky and went up on 23 April 2005, with Karim remarking on the length of the elephants' trunks.

Which DuPont fibre was first sold in 1938 as toothbrush bristles, two years before its famous stockings?

Nylon stockings sold 64 million pairs in their first year, 1940, and post-war shortages sparked 'nylon riots', with 40,000 people queueing in Pittsburgh for 13,000 pairs.

Who discovered rubber vulcanisation in 1839 when a sulfur mix hit a hot stove, yet died $200,000 in debt?

Charles Goodyear had no part in the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company: Frank Seiberling founded it in 1898, almost four decades after his death, and named it in his honour.

Which Czech playwright's 1920 drama R.U.R. gave English the word 'robot', from a term for forced labour?

Karel Čapek later credited his brother Josef, a painter, with coining the word, adapted from robota, the labour serfs owed their masters.

Walter Hunt twisted which fastener from brass wire in 1849 to clear a $15 debt, selling its patent for $400?

The safety pin came from a man who had built a lockstitch sewing machine in the 1830s but never patented it, fearing it would throw seamstresses out of work.

Which plant, carbonised into a filament, let Thomas Edison's early light bulbs burn for more than 1,200 hours?

Bamboo from Japan replaced the filament of Edison's first successful test, on 22 October 1879, which had glowed for only 13.5 hours.

Which science-fiction author proposed geostationary communication satellites in a 1945 Wireless World article?

Arthur C. Clarke's October 1945 paper 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays' is why the geostationary orbit is sometimes called the Clarke orbit or Clarke belt.

Which AT&T satellite relayed the first live transatlantic TV in 1962 and named a chart-topping instrumental?

Telstar 1 went up on 10 July 1962, and the Tornados' tune named after it became the first US number one single by a British group.

America's first satellite, launched in 1958, carried James Van Allen's cosmic-ray detector and was called what?

Explorer 1 was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and flown on a Juno I rocket four months after Sputnik, and the belts it found now carry Van Allen's name.

Hubble's primary mirror was polished too flat at the edge by 2,200 nanometres, causing which optical flaw?

Spherical aberration makes light from a mirror's edge focus at a different point from its centre; the 1993 servicing mission installed COSTAR's corrective optics to fix it.

The James Webb Space Telescope's 18 hexagonal, gold-plated mirror segments are made of which metal?

Beryllium stays stiff and stable at the telescope's cryogenic operating temperatures, and the segments together form a 6.5-metre mirror parked at the Sun–Earth L2 point.

Which NASA rover was lowered into Gale crater from a rocket-powered 'sky crane' in 2012?

Curiosity was too heavy for the airbags that cushioned earlier rovers' landings, so its descent stage lowered it on cables and then flew clear.

What pushes the ink out of the Fisher Space Pen, letting it write upside down and in a vacuum?

Pressurised nitrogen at about 310 kPa forces the ink out; Paul Fisher spent around $1 million of his own money on it, and NASA later bought 400 pens at $2.95 each.

Which singer's album 52nd Street, released in Japan on 1 October 1982, is usually cited as the first CD album?

Billy Joel's record was one of 50 CDs that CBS/Sony put out that day, but it carried the first catalogue number, 35DP-1, so it gets the credit.

Which element, number 106, was the first named after a living person, over IUPAC's 1994 objection?

Seaborgium honours Glenn Seaborg, who called it a greater honour than his Nobel Prize; oganesson, element 118, is the only other element named for someone then alive.

Minerals from a quarry in which Swedish village gave four chemical elements their names?

Ytterby gave its name to yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium, a trail that began in 1787 when army lieutenant Carl Axel Arrhenius picked up an unusually heavy black rock at its quarry.

Harry Brearley, credited with discovering stainless steel in 1913 as 'rustless steel', worked in which English city?

Sheffield cutler Ernest Stuart coined the catchier 'stainless steel' for the alloy, which Brearley had found while seeking a steel to stop gun barrels eroding.

Which particle did Wolfgang Pauli postulate in 1930, so light and elusive that it went undetected until 1956?

Neutrino, Italian for 'little neutral one', was named in Enrico Fermi's circle in Rome, and Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines finally caught it beside a Savannah River nuclear reactor.

Godfrey Hounsfield built the first CT scanner, used on a patient in Wimbledon in 1971, at which record company?

EMI's Hounsfield tested his experimental scanner on bullocks' brains that he carried across London on public transport, and later shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Allan Cormack.

Which antimatter particle did Carl Anderson find in cloud-chamber tracks in 1932, four years before his Nobel?

Positron tracks curving the 'wrong' way past a lead plate revealed the electron's antimatter twin, which Paul Dirac had predicted in 1931 and called an 'anti-electron'.

Which biochemist, demoted by her university in 1995, shared the 2023 Nobel Prize for mRNA vaccine work?

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman found nucleoside modifications that stop RNA triggering immune alarms, the trick that made mRNA vaccines workable; she later became a BioNTech senior vice president.

Which Glasgow surgeon's carbolic-acid antisepsis of the 1860s inspired a namesake antiseptic, now a mouthwash, in 1879?

Joseph Lister's methods, built on Louis Pasteur's germ theory, inspired St. Louis chemist Joseph Lawrence to name Listerine, a surgical antiseptic later sold as a floor cleaner before it was pitched against bad breath.

Which godson of Elizabeth I devised England's first flushing toilet, the Ajax, and wrote a 1596 book about it?

John Harington installed the Ajax at his manor in Kelston, and its name puns on 'jakes', Elizabethan slang for a privy; he was one of the childless queen's 102 godchildren.

Which fencing product, patented by DeKalb farmer Joseph Glidden in 1874 at age 61, changed ranching across the West?

Barbed wire made fencing so cheap that by 1890 fenced pasture had largely replaced the open range, and Texas cowmen who lost free grazing fought back by cutting fences in 1883.

Under what name did Raytheon sell the first commercial microwave oven in 1947, a water-cooled, 750-pound unit?

Radarange won an employee naming contest; the oven stood 1.8 metres tall, drew 3 kilowatts and was leased for about $5 a day.

Who staged a death-defying 1854 demonstration of his elevator brake at the New York Crystal Palace?

Elisha Otis rode the platform high in the air and ordered the rope cut; orders for his safety elevator, few until then, picked up, and in 1857 he installed the first one for passengers.

Who drove her husband's car from Mannheim to Pforzheim in 1888, refuelling at a pharmacy on the way?

Bertha Benz set off with her two teenage sons without telling her husband, leaving a note that they were visiting her mother, and he learned of the car's success by telegram.

What did Tim Berners-Lee call the first browser, written at CERN in 1990, which doubled as a page editor?

WorldWideWeb was renamed Nexus to stop people confusing the program with the web itself, and it let users edit pages as well as read them.

Which packing material began in 1957 as a failed textured wallpaper made by Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes?

Bubble wrap flopped as a plastic wallpaper, but its makers saw it could cushion parcels, founded Sealed Air in 1960, and shipping IBM's new 1401 computers became one of its first big uses.

Which Soviet engineer behind Sputnik was known publicly only as 'Chief Designer' until his death in 1966?

Sergei Korolev had survived Stalin's purges, spending months in a Kolyma Gulag camp after his 1938 arrest, before leading the Soviet space programme.

Which company sold the first instant camera, the 1948 Model 95, after Edwin Land's daughter asked to see a photo now?

Polaroid's founder was asked by his three-year-old daughter Jennifer why she could not see a holiday snapshot at once, and within the hour he had the idea for an instant camera.

Which language, begun in 1959 and partly based on Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC, ran behind 95% of card swipes in 2020?

COBOL, the Common Business-Oriented Language, was first seen as a stopgap, yet in 2020 several US states were short of the COBOL programmers needed to keep their swamped unemployment systems running.

Which fastener did George de Mestral invent after burdock burs clung to his dog on an Alpine hunt?

Velcro takes its name from the French words velours, velvet, and crochet, hook. Under a microscope de Mestral saw hundreds of tiny hooks on each bur that caught on anything with a loop, such as fur.

Douglas Engelbart's first computer mouse, built in the 1960s, had a shell made of which material?

Wood formed the boxy shell of the prototype, which rolled on two metal wheels. Engelbart said the device was nicknamed the mouse because its cord came out of the end like a tail.

Which insect did operators of the Harvard Mark II computer tape into their logbook in 1947?

A moth trapped in a relay was taped to the page and labelled the first actual case of a bug being found. Engineers had been calling defects bugs since at least the 1870s.

Alexander Graham Bell answered his telephone with which sailors' call, before 'hello' caught on?

Ahoy, said twice, was how Bell took calls on the device he had just patented. Edison proposed hello in an 1877 letter to the head of a Pittsburgh telegraph company, and it stuck.

Which stray dog from Moscow became the first animal to orbit Earth, aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957?

Laika was never expected to survive, because nobody had yet worked out how to bring a capsule back through the atmosphere. She died of overheating within hours, a fact kept from the public until 2002.

Which video game company was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards?

Nintendo was founded by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi to sell handmade decks. Hanafuda means flower cards, and the firm spent most of a century on cards and toys before video games.

Which gas was detected in sunlight during an 1868 eclipse, years before anyone found it on Earth?

Helium showed up as an unknown yellow line in the Sun's spectrum, so Norman Lockyer named it after helios, the Greek word for the Sun. Chemists first isolated it on Earth in 1895, from a uranium ore.

Olympus Mons, a volcano about two and a half times as tall as Everest, rises from which planet?

Mars built the volcano so wide, about 600 km across, and so gently sloped that a visitor near the summit would not know it was a mountain: the slopes run on out of sight.

Which Dayton business did Orville and Wilbur Wright run to pay for their flying experiments?

A bicycle shop gave the brothers more than money: they carved their propellers and had their engine made there, and Wilbur hit on wing-warping while idly twisting an inner-tube box.

Which 3M product grew from a weak glue that Art Fry used to anchor bookmarks in his hymn book?

Post-it Notes exist because Spencer Silver failed: in 1968 he was trying to make a super-strong adhesive. Their canary yellow was chance too, the colour of scrap paper in the lab next door.

Which drug did Alexander Fleming find after mould spoiled a culture plate during his 1928 holiday?

Penicillin was at first just 'mould juice' in Fleming's lab. He came back from a break in Suffolk on 3 September to find one plate with an open lid and mould growing on it.

Which coiner of the term 'radioactivity' is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences?

Marie Curie won for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911. During the First World War she fitted vehicles with X-ray equipment for field hospitals, mobile units nicknamed petites Curies.

What was the name of the Apollo 11 lunar module that landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon?

Eagle was named after the bald eagle on the mission patch, the national bird of the United States. Its descent stage remains on the lunar surface, where the two men spent more than 21 hours.

Diamond and the graphite in pencils are both forms of which chemical element?

Carbon makes both the hardest natural material known and one soft enough to leave a streak on paper. Graphite even takes its name from the Greek verb meaning to write.

Which search engine began in 1996 as BackRub, a Stanford project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin?

Google got its lasting name from a misspelling of googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, picked to signal how many websites the engine was meant to search.

Which body, named in 1930 at an Oxford schoolgirl's suggestion, became a dwarf planet in 2006?

Pluto was the suggestion of Venetia Burney, a girl keen on classical mythology, and staff at Lowell Observatory chose it by unanimous vote from more than a thousand names sent in.

Where on his wife's body did Wilhelm Röntgen aim his rays in 1895 for the first medical X-ray?

Her hand shows up as bare bones wearing a ring, in a print known as Hand mit Ringen. On seeing the picture she is reported to have said that she had seen her own death.

Which explosive did Alfred Nobel patent in 1867, building the fortune behind the prizes in his name?

Dynamite was the first safely manageable explosive stronger than black powder: Nobel soaked shock-sensitive nitroglycerin into an absorbent earth so that it could be handled and shipped.

Which Japanese word, meaning 'picture character', names the icons Shigetaka Kurita designed in 1999?

Emoji has nothing to do with the English word emotion: the resemblance is pure coincidence. Kurita's original 176 designs were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016.

Which primatologist, sent to Gombe in Tanzania in 1960, showed that chimpanzees use tools?

Jane Goodall had no degree when she started. Leakey later sent her to Cambridge, where she was only the eighth person allowed to study for a PhD without first earning a bachelor's degree.

Which Soviet cosmonaut became the first person in space, circling Earth once aboard Vostok 1?

Yuri Gagarin did not land inside his capsule: he ejected about 7 km up and parachuted to the ground separately. The whole flight took 108 minutes, and it was the only spaceflight he ever made.

Which author of the 1687 Principia later became warden of England's Royal Mint?

Isaac Newton took the Mint job in 1696, when clipping and counterfeiting had so weakened the currency that all the old hammered silver coins were being recalled and replaced.

Which astronomer spotted Jupiter's four largest moons in 1610 and ended his life under house arrest?

Galileo Galilei first described them as fixed stars, then watched over the following nights as they shifted around Jupiter. Moons circling another planet broke the old rule that every heavenly body circles Earth.

Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron is often called the first computer programmer?

Ada Lovelace earned the title with her published commentary on Charles Babbage's proposed analytical engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer. Babbage called her the Enchantress of Number.

Which British breaker of the Enigma cipher proposed a famous test of whether machines can think?

Alan Turing set out the test in a paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence. He also co-wrote a chess program for a computer that did not yet exist, and ran it on paper at half an hour a move.

Which IBM computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game rematch in 1997?

Deep Blue had lost to Kasparov the year before, winning one game, drawing two and losing three. After an upgrade it came back to win two games and draw three.

Which keyboard symbol did Ray Tomlinson pick in 1971 to split user from machine in email addresses?

The at sign has divided email addresses ever since Tomlinson wrote the first program able to send mail between users on different host computers.

Which company's first product was a computer designed by Steve Wozniak and sold in 1976 for $666.66?

Apple was founded after Steve Jobs saw a business in the machine his friend had designed for his own use. So few were made that surviving units sit in computer museums and fetch high prices at auction.

Which plants did the monk Gregor Mendel cross-breed for years to work out the rules of heredity?

Peas made Mendel the founder of genetics, but only after his death: three scientists independently verified his findings in 1900, sixteen years too late for him to know.

Which mild disease did Edward Jenner use in 1796 to protect a boy against smallpox?

Cowpox gave us the word vaccine, from Jenner's Latin name for the disease, meaning pustules of the cow. He took the material from a milkmaid who had caught it from a cow called Blossom.

Which Russian chemist's 1869 periodic table left gaps for elements that had not yet been discovered?

Dmitri Mendeleev did more than leave blanks: he predicted the properties of the missing elements, and gallium, scandium and germanium later turned up to match.

Which hormone did Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate from a dog's pancreas in 1921?

Insulin was first injected into a patient in January 1922: Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old at Toronto General Hospital. Banting went on to win a Nobel Prize at the age of 32.

Which cell structures, nicknamed the powerhouses of the cell, carry their own DNA from the mother?

Mitochondria have a genome much like a bacterium's, a clue that their ancestors were free-living microbes that fused with larger cells. In mammals, those in sperm are usually destroyed by the egg.

The stapes, the smallest and lightest bone in the human body, is found inside which organ?

The ear holds the stapes in its middle chamber, where the bone passes sound vibrations on towards the inner ear. Stapes is the Latin word for a stirrup, the shape it resembles.

Which blood type makes its carriers 'universal donors', because their red cells suit most patients?

O negative red cells carry no A or B antigens for a recipient's immune system to attack. Guidelines save them for cases such as emergencies in which there is no time to test a patient's blood group.

What did Alfred Wegener call the ancient supercontinent that split into the modern continents?

Pangaea comes from Greek words meaning all the Earth. Wegener, who set out his idea that the continents had once been joined in 1912, used the name only once, in the 1920 edition of his book.

Which temperature scale, named after a Belfast-born physicist, starts at absolute zero?

Kelvin honours William Thomson, who proposed an absolute scale in 1848 and was later made Lord Kelvin. He took the title from the river that runs by the University of Glasgow, where he taught for 53 years.

Which Scottish engineer adopted the term 'horsepower' to help sell his improved steam engines?

James Watt compared his engines with the pull of draft horses so that buyers could see what they were getting. The unit of power that most countries use instead of horsepower carries his own name.

Which German craftsman brought movable-type printing to Europe in the 1450s with a famous Bible?

Johannes Gutenberg borrowed 800 guilders from the moneylender Johann Fust to do it. Fust later demanded his money back and sued, and the inventor of the press was left effectively bankrupt.

The compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing are the Four Great Inventions of which country?

China had all four for centuries before Europe, word of which reached the West from the 1530s. In 1620 Francis Bacon wrote that three of them had altered the face and state of the world.

Which American portrait painter went on to co-develop a telegraph code of dots and dashes?

Samuel Morse painted for a living until middle age, then helped to invent an electric telegraph system based on European telegraphs. The code that carries his name dates from 1837.

The nose of Japan's 500 Series Shinkansen train was modelled on the beak of which diving bird?

Kingfisher beaks gave the engineers their streamlined shape. The redesign is credited with cutting both the train's energy use and its noise.

Which US Defense Department network, switched on in 1969, was the forerunner of the internet?

ARPANET carried its first message on the night of 29 October 1969. Most computer companies had thought the plan outlandish, and only twelve of them bid to build the network.

In which city did surgeon Christiaan Barnard perform the first human heart transplant in 1967?

Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital was the setting. Louis Washkansky, 54, received the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall and was soon talking with his wife, but died of pneumonia 18 days later.

Which physicist built the first electric battery after a row over why dissected frogs' legs twitch?

Alessandro Volta answered Luigi Galvani, who credited animal electricity, by showing that two metals and brine-soaked cloth made electricity flow with no frog. His pile of zinc and copper discs was the first battery.

Which worldwide network of radio dishes produced the first image of a black hole in 2019?

Event Horizon Telescope is the name for radio observatories around the globe whose data are combined into a single array. Its other main target is Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

Which glowing element did Hennig Brand discover in 1669 while boiling urine in search of gold?

Phosphorus got its name from the Greek for light-bearer, after its eerie glow. Brand, who was hunting the philosopher's stone, had made the first discovery of an element since antiquity.

Which doctor cut deaths in an 1840s Vienna maternity ward by making staff wash in chlorinated lime?

Ignaz Semmelweis could not explain why washing worked, and some doctors, offended at the suggestion, mocked him. In 1865 colleagues committed him to an asylum, where he died 14 days later.

Whose cancer cells, taken at Johns Hopkins in 1951, became the first immortal human cell line?

Henrietta Lacks was the unwitting source of the HeLa line: the cells came from a tumour biopsied during her treatment for cervical cancer, and she died that October. They have reproduced in laboratories ever since.

Which Dutch draper, using microscopes he made himself, became the first person to observe bacteria?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was largely self-taught and began exploring microbial life in the 1670s. He was also the first to document muscle fibres, sperm cells and red blood cells under the microscope.