Electronics History Quiz
December 1965 Popular Electronics

December 1965 Popular Electronics

December 1965 Popular Electronics Cover - RF CafeTable of Contents

Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Popular Electronics, published October 1954 - April 1985. All copyrights are hereby acknowledged.

Robert Balin created scores of electronics-related quizzes for Popular Electronics magazine (see list at bottom of page). Having appeared in the December 1965 issue, some of the subjects are a bit dated, but hey, this is an electronics history quiz. I got 80% - yeah, sort of pathetic, but I don't recall ever hearing of Heising and I couldn't figure out what item "A" was (hint: it's a TV iconoscope, BTW). That left me with a guess between "A" and "G" for #9 and #10, which of course I got wrong with a 50-50 chance.

Electronics History Quiz

By Robert P. Balin

Electronics History Quiz, December 1965 Popular Electronics - RF CafeMany present-day electronics devices have been around for a long time, and some still bear the manes of their inventors. Try matching the names of the well-known scientists listed above (1-10) with drawings A-J of the devices or circuits they helped develop.

1 Fleming ___

2 Hartley ___

3 Leclanche ___

4 Morse ___

5 Oersted ___

6 Pierce ___

7 Tesla ___

8 Wien ___

9 Zworykin ___

10 Heising ___

 

 

 

 

See answers below.


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.

RF Cafe Quizzes

Vintage Electronics Magazine Quizzes

Vintage Electronics Magazine Quizzes

 

 

 

 

 

 

History Quiz Answers

1 - H - John A. Fleming applied for a patent for his diode vacuum tube in 1904. It utilized the Edison effect principle discovered 20 years earlier.

2 - B - Ralph V. Hartley invented the oscillator circuit that bears his name. It uses a parallel-tuned tank circuit with a tapped coil to provide the feedback voltage.

3 - C - Georges Leclanche invented the dry cell using a solid depolarizer in 1868. To this day carbon-zinc dry cells are known as Leclanche cells.

4 - I - Samuel F. Morse and his co-workers, Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, demonstrated their electromagnetic relay telegraph in 1838, using the original version of the dot-and-dash code. The manual key, adopted later, was actually invented by Vail.

5 - D - Hans C. Øersted discovered, in 1819, that a magnetic field existed around a current-carrying conductor.

6 - F - George W. Pierce was the first to apply a piezoelectric crystal to a vacuum-tube oscillator circuit. This circuit, which now bears his name, is basically a crystal-controlled version of the Colpitts oscillator.

7 - J - Nicola Tesla invented the high-frequency oscillator transformer known as the Tesla coil in 1891.

8 - E - Max Wien developed the basic principles of a.c. bridges, and published a collection of his bridge networks in 1891. The Wien bridge is used to make capacitance and frequency measurements.

9 - A - Vladimir K. Zworykin invented the television iconoscope in 1923.

10 - G - Raymond A. Heising developed the constant-current form of plate modulation that bears his name. This method of modulation is widely used in high-power broadcasting stations.

 

 

Posted April 4, 2018