All RF Cafe quizzes would make perfect fodder for employment interviews for technicians or engineers
- particularly those who are fresh out of school or are relatively new to the work world. Come to
think of it, they would make equally excellent study material for the same persons who are going to
be interviewed for a job.Some of these books used in quizzes
are available as prizes in the monthly
RF Cafe Giveaway
Note: Many answers contain passages quoted from the text.
quiz is based on the information presented in Remarkable Engineers, from Riquet to Shannon, by Ioan
James. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Note: Some of these books
are available as prizes in the monthly RF
1. Why is the subtitle "From Riquet to Shannon?
a) The engineers covered run
alphabetically from Ri through Sh; others are covered
in the rest of the book series.
b) Riquet is
the earliest engineer covered, and Shannon is the latest
c) Those are the author's most and least favorite
d) Those are the author's least and most favorite engineers, respectively
2. Who first suggested that water was composed of hydrogen and oxygen?
a) Edith Clarke
c) Sir Charles Parsons
d) James Watt
What was the main motivation for Charles Babbage to develop his Difference Engine?
a) To make subtraction
of larges number easier
b) To eliminate the errors in existing numerical tables of logarithms, etc.
make his mark in the world of mathematics
d) Is was his Senior Project at the University of Leeds
Sir William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (or Lord Kelvin), is well-know for proposing the concept
zero. For what else is he famous?
a) Partnering with the
Klein Bottle inventor to manufacture Kelvin-Klein blue
b) Development of surface integrals
c) A magnetic compass
d) He was a renowned chef
Westinghouse is a giant in the nuclear power and household appliance industries,
and was so formerly in
defense electronics (I worked for their Oceanic division in
Annapolis, MD, in the 1980s). What was George
Westinghouse's first major
a) Compressed air brakes for trains
c) Portable furniture
d) Machine screws with left-handed threads
6. Who confirmed the existence of
a) James Clerk Maxwell
b) Albert Einstein
c) Joseph Henry
d) Heinrich Hertz
What was Elmer Sperry's most notable invention?
a) The navigational gyroscope
b) TTL logic
c) The electron microscope
d) The solderless breadboard
8. Who made the
first transatlantic radio transmission?
a) Heinrich Hertz
b) Guglielmo Marconi
c) Nikola Tesla
d) Thomas Edison
What is Edith Clarke's claim to fame?
a) She invented a voltage regulator for long-distance power lines
b) She was the first female to earn an MSEE degree from MIT
c) She was the first professionally employed
woman in the U.S.
d) All of the above
Aside from co-inventing the first transistor, for what else was William Shockley well-known?
b) Discovery of the memristor
c) The AC storage battery
d) Inventing coaxial cable