Space Race & Industry

40 questions · Answers revealed below each question · Print this set

1.Which rocket family boosted the Mercury orbital flights?
- A. the Redstone
- B. the Atlas
- C. the Titan II
- D. the Saturn IB
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the Atlas
Did you know? Atlas boosters launched Glenn and his orbital successors.
2.Which inventor patented the cotton gin in 1794?
- A. Eli Whitney
- B. Cyrus McCormick
- C. Oliver Evans
- D. John Deere
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Eli Whitney
Did you know? Whitney's gin cleaned 50 pounds of cotton a day.
3.Which Mercury astronaut died in the January 1967 Apollo 1 fire?
- A. Alan Shepard
- B. Gus Grissom
- C. Scott Carpenter
- D. Wally Schirra
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Gus Grissom
Did you know? Grissom, second American in space, had flown Liberty Bell 7 and Gemini 3.
4.Which Pittsburgh station became America's first commercial radio broadcaster, in November 1920?
- A. KDKA
- B. WNBC
- C. WJZ
- D. WGN
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KDKA
Did you know? KDKA's first broadcast reported the Harding-Cox election returns.
5.Which May 1969 mission rehearsed a full Moon landing to 8.4 nautical miles above the surface?
- A. Apollo 11
- B. Apollo 12
- C. Apollo 10
- D. Apollo 9
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Apollo 10
Did you know? Apollo 10's lunar module was nicknamed Snoopy.
6.Which young women staffed the Massachusetts textile town founded by Francis Lowell?
- A. the Amoskeag weavers
- B. the Paterson silk workers
- C. the Lowell mill girls
- D. the Homestead rollers
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the Lowell mill girls
Did you know? The Lowell mill girls wrote and published their own magazine, The Lowell Offering.
7.Which 1973 station hosted three crews until the last left in February 1974?
- A. Salyut 1
- B. the International Space Station
- C. Skylab
- D. Mir
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Skylab
Did you know? Skylab's crews studied the Sun and the effects of weightlessness.
8.Which two companies built the first transcontinental railroad?
- A. the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
- B. the Great Northern and Northern Pacific
- C. the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific
- D. the B&O and Pennsylvania Railroads
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the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
Did you know? The Central Pacific built east from Sacramento; the Union Pacific built west from Omaha.
9.What did Alan Shepard name his 1961 Mercury capsule?
- A. Liberty Bell 7
- B. Columbia
- C. Friendship 7
- D. Freedom 7
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Freedom 7
Did you know? Shepard's Freedom 7 flew a 15-minute suborbital arc on May 5, 1961.
10.Which Illinois blacksmith's polished-steel plow sliced the Midwest's sticky prairie soil, from 1837?
- A. Charles Newbold
- B. John Deere
- C. Cyrus McCormick
- D. Jethro Wood
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John Deere
Did you know? Deere's plow, "the plow that broke the plains," founded a farm-machinery giant.
11.In which year did the Space Shuttle fleet retire after 135 missions?
- A. 2009
- B. 2011
- C. 2003
- D. 2014
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2011
Did you know? Atlantis closed the program with STS-135 in July 2011.
12.Which horse-drawn harvesting machine did Cyrus McCormick patent in 1834?
- A. the mechanical reaper
- B. the threshing machine
- C. the steel plow
- D. the cotton gin
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the mechanical reaper
Did you know? McCormick's reaper let one worker harvest twelve acres a day.
13.Which immigrant workforce made up as much as 90 percent of the Central Pacific's laborers?
- A. Irish workers
- B. Mexican workers
- C. Chinese workers
- D. German workers
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Chinese workers
Did you know? Thousands of Chinese laborers cut and blasted the Sierra crossings.
14.Who tapped "What hath God wrought," the first official telegraph message, in 1844?
- A. Alexander Graham Bell
- B. Thomas Edison
- C. Samuel Morse
- D. Cyrus Field
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Samuel Morse
Did you know? Morse sent the message from Washington to Baltimore in May 1844.
15.Which boat did Robert Fulton steam up the Hudson in 1807?
- A. the Enterprise
- B. the Fulton
- C. the Clermont
- D. the Savannah
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the Clermont
Did you know? Fulton's steamboat linked New York and Albany in 32 hours.
16.Whose 1914 announcement of a five-dollar day halved turnover at his plants?
- A. George Pullman
- B. Andrew Carnegie
- C. Henry Leland
- D. Henry Ford
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Henry Ford
Did you know? The five-dollar day doubled most autoworkers' pay.
17.Which 1901 merger created the world's first billion-dollar corporation?
- A. U.S. Steel
- B. the Pennsylvania Railroad
- C. Standard Oil
- D. General Motors
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U.S. Steel
Did you know? J.P. Morgan assembled U.S. Steel from Carnegie's company and rivals.
18.Which New Jersey laboratory, history's first industrial R&D shop, earned its founder the "Wizard" nickname?
- A. West Orange
- B. Menlo Park
- C. Schenectady Works
- D. Bell Labs
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Menlo Park
Did you know? Edison's Menlo Park team announced a minor invention "every ten days".
19.Which engineer invented modern air conditioning, in 1902?
- A. Frederick Jones
- B. Charles Gates
- C. Willis Carrier
- D. Stuart Cramer
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Willis Carrier
Did you know? Carrier's first system cooled a Brooklyn printing plant.
20.Which French-born engineer designed the inner iron skeleton of the Statue of Liberty?
- A. Gustav Lindenthal
- B. Frédéric Bartholdi
- C. Richard Hunt
- D. Gustave Eiffel
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Gustave Eiffel
Did you know? Eiffel's armature lets the copper skin sway in the wind.
21.Which refrigeration innovation, patented in 1867, let dressed beef reach distant markets year-round?
- A. the cold-storage warehouse
- B. the canning process
- C. the refrigerated railroad car
- D. the icebox
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the refrigerated railroad car
Did you know? J.B. Sutherland's patent made year-round fresh beef possible.
22.Which 1967 treaty bars national appropriation of the Moon and other celestial bodies?
- A. the Outer Space Treaty
- B. the Partial Test Ban Treaty
- C. the Moon Agreement
- D. the Antarctic Treaty
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the Outer Space Treaty
Did you know? The Outer Space Treaty entered into force in October 1967.
23.Whose "Tom Thumb" locomotive lost a famous 1830 race against a horse-drawn railcar?
- A. Matthias Baldwin
- B. Ross Winans
- C. Peter Cooper
- D. Phineas Davis
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Peter Cooper
Did you know? Cooper's demonstration sold the Baltimore & Ohio on steam power.
24.Which November 1969 mission landed within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 probe?
- A. Apollo 16
- B. Apollo 14
- C. Apollo 15
- D. Apollo 12
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Apollo 12
Did you know? Conrad and Bean walked to Surveyor 3 and took parts home.
25.Which automaker, founded in 1908 from Buick, grew by acquiring Cadillac and Chevrolet?
- A. Studebaker
- B. General Motors
- C. Chrysler
- D. Ford Motor Company
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General Motors
Did you know? William Durant built GM into the world's largest automaker by 1931.
26.Which Soviet cosmonaut died in the April 1967 Soyuz 1 crash?
- A. Georgy Dobrovolsky
- B. Viktor Patsayev
- C. Vladimir Komarov
- D. Yuri Gagarin
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Vladimir Komarov
Did you know? Komarov's parachute failed on re-entry after orbital problems.
27.Which sleeping-car company's town, rent hikes and 1894 boycott drew a federal crackdown?
- A. Pullman
- B. Wagner
- C. Pulliam
- D. Budd
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Pullman
Did you know? George Pullman's company town became the Pullman Strike's stage.
28.Which March 1966 mission achieved the first space docking, with the Agena target vehicle?
- A. Gemini 11
- B. Gemini 6A
- C. Gemini 8
- D. Gemini 12
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Gemini 8
Did you know? Neil Armstrong flew Gemini 8 and stabilized a stuck thruster after docking.
29.Which 1889 dam failure sent a wall of water through a Pennsylvania steel town?
- A. the Johnstown Flood
- B. the Mill River flood
- C. the St. Francis Dam failure
- D. the Austin Dam
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the Johnstown Flood
Did you know? The Johnstown Flood of May 1889 killed about 2,200 people.
30.Which 1962 satellite carried the first live transatlantic television pictures?
- A. Echo 1
- B. Telstar
- C. Syncom 3
- D. Intelsat I
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Telstar
Did you know? Bell Labs' Telstar relayed TV between Andover, Maine and Pleumeur-Bodou, France.
31.Whose Kinetoscope parlor opened commercial film exhibition in New York, in April 1894?
- A. Auguste Lumière
- B. Edwin Porter
- C. George Eastman
- D. Thomas Edison
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Thomas Edison
Did you know? Brothers Holland ran the first Kinetoscope parlor at 1155 Broadway.
32.Which professional geologist walked on the Moon with Apollo 17, in December 1972?
- A. Owen Garriott
- B. Harrison Schmitt
- C. Story Musgrave
- D. Jack Lousma
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Harrison Schmitt
Did you know? Schmitt, the only scientist on the Moon, helped select the Taurus-Littrow site.
33.Which Swedish-born engineer designed the Union ironclad Monitor, of 1862 fame?
- A. Isambard Brunel
- B. Benjamin Isherwood
- C. John Ericsson
- D. Robert Fulton
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John Ericsson
Did you know? Ericsson's rotating-turret design revolutionized warship architecture.
34.Which December 1965 Gemini pairing achieved the first crewed space rendezvous?
- A. Gemini 5 and Gemini 6
- B. Gemini 6A and Gemini 7
- C. Gemini 3 and Gemini 4
- D. Gemini 8 and Gemini 9
Show answer
Gemini 6A and Gemini 7
Did you know? The two capsules flew formation within a few feet of each other.
35.Which inventor, the "father of FM radio," developed frequency modulation in 1933?
- A. Lee de Forest
- B. Guglielmo Marconi
- C. Edwin Armstrong
- D. Nikola Tesla
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Edwin Armstrong
Did you know? Armstrong's FM cut static that plagued AM broadcasting.
36.Which Soviet 1968 mission, with tortoises aboard, circled the Moon and returned alive?
- A. Vostok 3
- B. Luna 15
- C. Soyuz 3
- D. Zond 5
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Zond 5
Did you know? Zond 5's tortoises became the first life to circle the Moon and survive.
37.In which year did Rockefeller become the world's first recorded billionaire?
- A. 1901
- B. 1889
- C. 1923
- D. 1916
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1916
Did you know? His fortune peaked near two percent of the national economy.
38.Which Kennedy Space Center pad launched the Moon missions, from Apollo 11 onward?
- A. Launch Complex 39A
- B. Launch Complex 39B
- C. Launch Complex 37
- D. Launch Complex 34
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Launch Complex 39A
Did you know? Pad 39A later launched the first Space Shuttle flight.
39.Which January 1901 Texas well, gushing 100,000 barrels a day, launched the Texas oil boom?
- A. Teapot Dome
- B. Drake Well
- C. Oil Creek
- D. Spindletop
Show answer
Spindletop
Did you know? Spindletop's Lucas Gusher drilled more oil in nine days than the rest of the world combined.
40.Which inventor demonstrated all-electronic television in San Francisco in 1927?
- A. David Sarnoff
- B. Vladimir Zworykin
- C. Philo Farnsworth
- D. John Logie Baird
Show answer
Philo Farnsworth
Did you know? Farnsworth was 21 when he transmitted a single straight line.

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