Inventors and their inventions: Can you match them up?

Jack Babalon/Flickr

How well do you know your inventors? See if you can match up these 15 important ideas with the famous inventors who created them. Good luck!

Question 1 of 15

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Who invented SCUBA diving?

The famous oceanographer Jacques Cousteau worked with engineer Emile Gagnan to invent the Aqua-Lung, the first commercially successful scuba apparatus, in 1942.

Question 2 of 15

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Who invented braille?

French inventor Louis Braille, blind since early childhood, developed the braille system in the 1820s, when he was still in his teens.

Question 3 of 15

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Who invented the World Wide Web?

While working at CERN in the '80s, Tim Berners-Lee developed the technology that created the World Wide Web (which he also named).

Question 4 of 15

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Who invented the diesel engine?

Engineer Rudolf Diesel invented his namesake engine in 1893.

Question 5 of 15

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Who invented the difference engine and the analytical engine?

English polymath and inventor Charles Babbage invented both the difference and analytic engines, which were early mechanical versions of the computer, in the 1820s and '30s.

Question 6 of 15

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Photo: Taste and See
Who invented the toilet ballcock?

We can thank plumber Thomas Crapper for inventing the ballcock, that funny floating thing in your toilet tank that controls how water refills the tank after a flush.

Question 7 of 15

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Who invented the polio vaccine?

Dr. Jonas Salk invented the vaccine for polio in 1955, saving millions of people around the globe from the ravages of the disease.

Question 8 of 15

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Horia Varlan/Flickr
Who invented the parachute?

Leonardo di Vinci designed a pyramidal parachute in 1480, hundreds of years before the first actual successful parachute jump.

Question 9 of 15

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Who invented the radio?

While many people were involved with developing the technology of using radio waves to send sound over long distances, it was Nikola Tesla who invented much of the basic infrastructure used to power radios today.

Question 10 of 15

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Who invented bifocals?

We can thank Benjamin Franklin for the invention.

Question 11 of 15

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Who invented the computer program?

Countess Ada Lovelace, daughter of the famous English poet Lord Byron, worked with Charles Babbage to devise a way to use his analytical engine to work out the Bernoulli sequence. This is now considered to be the first computer program.

Question 12 of 15

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Who invented roll film?

Photography pioneer George Eastman perfected the design for roll film in the late 1880s and soon after founded the Eastman Kodak Company.

Question 13 of 15

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Adam Wyles/Flickr
Who invented the geodesic dome?

Architect Buckminster Fuller invented the geodesic dome while working as a professor at North Carolina's Black Mountain College in 1948 and 1949.

Question 14 of 15

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Who invented the computer compiler?

U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneer in the world of computer science. She developed the first compiler, which turns human-written code into forms understandable by computers, in the 1950s.

Question 15 of 15

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Who invented LSD?

Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of his newly synthesized chemical LSD while on a bike ride home in 1938.

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