General Knowledge Quiz
Behind everyday objects like a sheet of paper or a supermarket barcode sit stories few people ever hear.
This general knowledge quiz with answers skips capitals and flags. Instead it follows familiar things, from the minutes on a clock to the checkout at the shop, back to where they began.
Did you know?
- The first webcam was set up around 1991 at the University of Cambridge to watch a coffee pot in a computer lab, so researchers would not walk to an empty pot. It went online in 1993, drew visitors from around the world, and ran until 2001, when the pot was sold at auction.
- The first traffic light was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in London in December 1868. It used railway-style arms by day and gas-lit red and green lamps at night, and a police officer operated it by hand. A gas leak made it explode only weeks later, and the idea was dropped for decades.
- The standard shipping container changed world trade after the trucking businessman Malcom McLean sent 58 containers on the ship Ideal X from New Jersey to Texas in 1956. Loading loose cargo by hand had been slow and costly, and sealed boxes that moved directly between ships, trains and trucks cut those costs dramatically.
Where everyday things come from
General knowledge is less a list of facts than a web of connections. The coins in a pocket, the paper in a printer and the minutes on a watch all carry decisions made by people long ago, sometimes for reasons that no longer apply. Many of these choices survived simply because changing them would be harder than keeping them. Looking at their origins explains why the modern world works the way it does, and why so many standards still differ from country to country.
Standards that shape daily life
The A series of paper sizes is built on a clever ratio. Each sheet's sides relate as one to the square root of two, so cutting a sheet in half produces two smaller sheets with exactly the same shape. A0 has an area of one square metre, A1 is half of that, and so on down to A4 and beyond. Most countries use the system today, while the United States and Canada mainly use Letter size, which is slightly wider and shorter than A4.
Inventions that found a new purpose
Many successful products began as something else. Bubble wrap took off after its makers founded the company Sealed Air in 1960, and one of its first large customers was IBM, which used it to protect computers during shipping. Play-Doh started life as a putty for cleaning soot from wallpaper before it was reformulated as a children's toy in the 1950s. The Slinky came from an engineer at a naval shipyard who watched a tension spring fall off a shelf and keep moving.
Names with hidden histories
Everyday names often hide older stories. Bluetooth is named after Harald Bluetooth, a tenth-century Danish king remembered for uniting tribes, a nod to a technology meant to connect devices. The airline Qantas takes its name from Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, founded in 1920. The pound sign comes from a stylised L for libra, a Roman unit of weight, which is also why the abbreviation for pounds in weight is lb.