For questions 1-15 read the text about the British bright sparks and their inventions. Use the root of the words given with the relevant number to form a word that fits the space. -- Spirit of inventions From pioneering scientists to trailblazers in the fields of medicine and media, meet the British bright sparks who can be credited with some of the world’s greatest inventions Communications pioneers It is hard to imagine life without computers and the World Wide Web, but while the latter, invented by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, embraced the globe in a whirlwind, the former took rather longer to catch on. As far back as the 1820s mathematician Charles Babbage (who also has a speedometer and a cowcatcher to his credit) designed a mechanical Difference Engine to solve .......... (1. MATHEMATICS) problems, and his Analytical Engine of the 1830s, while never completed in his lifetime, featured most of the basic elements of modern computers. Fellow mathematician Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, wrote a program for the Analytical Engine and has been called the first computer programmer. Alas, she too was way ahead of her time. Disappointment as an artist spurred another Victorian, William Henry Fox Talbot, to find an alternative way to ’capture’ images and in so doing he became a pioneer of the negative/positive process that was standard in most photography before our digital age. An 1835 image of a small window at Fox Talbot’s home, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, is celebrated as the world’s earliest surviving photographic negative. Four decades later, Edinburgh-born scientist and teacher of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell, after much .......... (2. EXPERIMENT) in the transmission of sounds using electricity, gained a UK patent for his invention of the telephone in 1876. Queen Victoria, „gratified and surprised” by his demonstrations of long-distance calls from Osborne House on the Isle of Wight to Southampton and London, .......... (3. IMMEDIATE) sought to buy two of the new-fangled instruments. Another Scotsman, John Logie Baird, is known as the father of Television, after demonstrating his invention to scientists of the Royal Institution in 1926. To think he had made his first apparatus using a hat box, tea chest, bicycle-light lenses and other odds and ends! Medical trailblazers Diligent observation is the key to .......... (4. LOCK) many discoveries, and when Edward Jenner, a Gloucestershire country surgeon, noticed that local folk who caught cowpox also developed immunity to the more fatal smallpox, he felt he was on to something. To prove his theory, he inoculated an eight-year-old boy with cowpox in 1796 and then later with smallpox: a risky experiment, but the .......... (5. IMMUNE) worked, and the practice of preventive vaccinations took off. .......... (6. SERENDIPITOUS) can also prove a game-changer, as when research scientist Alexander Fleming, returning to his laboratory in London’s St Mary’s Hospital after a holiday in 1928, found a mould, Penicillium notatum, had settled in and was killing a dish of bacteria he had left out. Fleming was later awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin, along with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain for its practical development. The era of life-saving antibiotics opened up. Manufacturing marvels With the dawn of the Industrial revolution, inventions came thick and fast as people scrambled to make more, better, faster. In the field of textiles, James Hargreaves spinning jenny (1764) .......... (7. ABLE) a large number of threads to be spun simultaneously – and sparked riots by cottage weavers fearful for their livelihoods. The following decade Richard Arkwright introduced his water frame – spinning machines driven by water power – and Samuel Crompton combined features of both inventions to create the even more advanced spinning mule. But Arkwright (a travelling wigmaker-turned-inventor) ruthlessly .......... (8. DO) everyone by innovating factory systems: first at his mill in Cromford, Derbyshire, and then elsewhere. He died a very rich man in 1792. Technological revolution was also driven by Thomas Newcomen, James Watt and the flamboyant entrepreneur Matthew Boulton. Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engine (1712) replaced teams of men and horses to pump water from mines, and Watt then made steam engines more efficient by using a separate condenser. The Boulton & Watt .......... (9. WORK) in Birmingham were soon supplying steam engines to all sorts of enterprises, from mines, .......... (10. DISTILL) and canals to cotton, paper and flour mills, .......... (11. ALLOW) Boulton the proud boast: „I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – POWER.” Movers and shakers In the story of 19th-century railwaymania that transformed travel and transport around the world, everyone remembers father-and-son duo George and Robert Stephenson, whose steam locomotive Rocket wowed spectators at the 1829 Rainhill Trials competition outside Liverpool. But spare a thought for Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick who was actually the first to demonstrate a stream-powered loco to haul a load on rails: it trundled „at nearly five miles an hour” some nine miles from Penydarren ironworks to the canal wharf at Abercynon in South Wales in 1804 as part of a wager between rival ironmasters. After adventures abroad (he was almost eaten by an alligator), Trevithick, a forgotten hero, died .......... (12. PENNY) in 1833. Similarly, we remember Scottish-born vet J B Dunlop for inventing the pneumatic rubber tyre (patented 1888) that gave .......... (13. CYCLE) a confier ride, but perhaps forget serial Scottish inventor Robert William Thomson who had already, unbeknownst to Dunlop, patented the idea abroad and demonstrated his ’Aerial Wheels’ for horse-drawn carriages in London’s Regent’s Park in 1847. The literal ’aerial’ prize is taken by Coventry-born RAF pilot Frank Whittle, creator of the first jet engine. Through the 1920s and 1930s the Air Ministry .......... (14. RIDICULOUS) his vision for high-speed jet propulsion as .......... (15. PRACTICE). But with war looming, Ministry minds changed: a test flight was made in 1941 and by 1944 the Meteor jet aircraft was in service to intercept German V-1 rockets.
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