Electronics History Quiz
December 1965 Popular Electronics

December 1965 Popular Electronics Table 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

Many 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.

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