Co-Inventors Quiz
January 1965 Electronics World

January 1965 Electronics World   Table of Contents  Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Electronics World, published May 1959 - December 1971. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

Robert P. Balin created many electronics-related quizzes for Popular Electronics magazine. I have posted lots of them here on RF Cafe, and will post more in the future (see list below). He designed quizzes for Electronics World magazine before the publication's name changed to Popular Electronics. Most of the Popular Electronics era quizzes were pretty easy for anyone who has been in the electronics realm a few years. However, this "Co-Inventors Quiz" from a 1965 issue of Electronics World is a real head scratcher. I was only able to get two out of 10 answers correct. It would take someone who is a physics historian to even come close to acing it - that or I'm really just lacking in historical knowledge. Bon chance.

Co-Inventors Quiz

By Robert P. Balin

Many important discoveries and inventions in the field of electronics were made by men who worked together as a team, and current textbooks still include the names of the co-inventors (1-10) listed below, See how many of these teams you can match with the sketches (A-J) which illustrate the devices or theory which they helped to develop.

(See answers below)

1.Barkhausen-Kurz  ____

2. Biot-Savart  ____

3. Eccles-Jordan  ____

4. Fermi-Dirac  ____

5. Fletcher-Munson  ____

6. Foster-Seeley  ____

7. Geiger-Muller  ____

8. Kennelly-Heaviside  ____

9. Langmuir-Child  ____

10. Loftin-White  ____

Quizzes from vintage electronics magazines such as Popular Electronics, Electronics-World, QST, and Radio News were published over the years - some really simple and others not so simple. Robert P. Balin created most of the quizzes for Popular Electronics. This is a listing of all I have posted thus far.

Answers

1-D.   The Barkhausen-Kurz oscillator circuit is a positive-grid u.h.f. oscillator by Lecher wires in the grid and plate circuits.

2-E.   The Biot-Savart Law, or Ampere's Law, specifies the direction and magnitude of the magnetic field at any point in the vicinity of a current-carrying conduelor.

3-J.   The Eccles-Jordan trigger circuit, or flip-flop, is a bistable multivibrator in which the conducting state of each half is changed only by the incoming pulses.

4-B.   Fermi-Dirac statistics predict the availability of current carriers in the semiconductor materials used to make transistors.

55-I.    Fletcher-Munson curves show the relationship between the signal frequency and the sound intensity required by a listener to hear a constant loudness.

6-G.  The Foster-Seeley FM discriminator circuit converts a frequency-modulated radio-frequency carrier into an

         amplitude-modulated signal from which the audio is detected by a balanced diode circuit.

7-F.   A Geiger-Muller tube detects nuclear radiation when beta particles ionize the gas inside the tube to start a discharge of electrons between the cathode case and highly positive anode.

8-C.  The Kennelly-Heaviside layer is the original term for the ionosphere, now known to consist of various layers, whose height and degree of ionization determine their effect upon high-frequency radio transmission.

9-H.   The Langmuir-Child Law, or Three-Halves Power Law, describes the relationship between the applied voltage and the resulting current in a diode vacuum tube.

10-A.  The Loftin-White amplifier circuit uses direct coupling between stages and can handle signal frequencies down to d.c.

Posted September 7, 2022
(updated from original post on 3/19/2015)