Quiz | Easy as Sunday morning: What has August 11 given us?

1 / 10 | The ‘Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar’ begins on August 11, 3114 BC, and is considered the date of creation of the universe in those cultures. The Mayan civilization that followed believed that the succeeding Fourth World, where humans lived, would end on the 13th baktun (a baktun is 1,44,000 days). This was translated as a special date in the Julian calendar, which raised interest in popular culture. According to this calendar, the end of the world was supposed to be on what date?

2 / 10 | Hollywood leading actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received a patent for a frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system on August 11, 1942. They developed it by standing around an 88-key piano. This patent later became the basis of a modern technology that is now present in many of our devices. What is this technology that usually requires a password?

3 / 10 | Born on this day in 1858, Christiaan Eijkman was a Dutch physician who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering a special organic molecule. He made the discovery while he was researching how poor diet causes a disease called beriberi. What did he discover that can now be taken in pill form?

4/10 | James Plimpton leased the Atlantic House Hotel in Rhode Island on August 11, 1866, and turned the dining room into a playground he called a ‘rink.’ He did this to promote his invention, a four-wheeled device that he asked people to wear and run on. What did he invent?

5/10 | Henry S. Parmelee received a patent for his invention on this day in 1874. He ran a company called the ‘Matthewsek Piano Manufacturing Company’, and was concerned about the amount of valuable wood stored in the factory. So, he invented the first automated version of a system we now see everywhere from parks to golf lawns. What did he invent?

6/10 | Arguably the most famous children’s author of all time, this person was born on August 11, 1897. She could write up to 10,000 publishable words per day, the equivalent of 800 books. Although she excelled at tennis at school, she trained as a teacher at Ipswich High School. Who was this prolific writer who began her legacy with a collection of poems called Child Whispers?

7/10 | Austrian biochemist Erwin Chargaff, whose study of a certain molecule at Columbia University sparked the revolution known as biotechnology, was born on this day in 1905. His lecture, where he said that the amounts of adenine and thymine in a molecule were roughly equal, the amounts of cytosine and guanine were also roughly equal, was attended by James Watson and Francis Crick, who further developed this idea. What molecule did these gentlemen study?

8 / 10 | On August 11, 1909, Theodore Haubner, a telegraph operator aboard the American ship SS Arapaho, sent a series of signals as his ship became disabled near Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. Technically, this is not an acronym or an abbreviation; it’s just the most convenient way to send a message. This was the earliest use of which signal?

9/10 | Born on August 11, 1950, American computer scientist Steve Wozniak started the personal computer revolution. He was the designer of the first successful mass-produced microcomputer and later created the first programmable universal remote. He founded which company with Steve Jobs in 1976 and worked from a garage?

10/10 | On this day in 1968, The Beatles released a song that became the song sung at the end of almost every concert (even non-Beatle ones). Written to calm Jules Lennon after his parents separated, the song starts out as a ballad and ends with an iconic loop of vocals that has the entire stadium standing up and cheering loudly. This is a song that just keeps getting better, better, better, right?