Inventions and Discoveries — A Hundred Names, Sorted So You Can Actually Keep Them

This is not really a chapter. It is a list, and lists are lost the same way every time: revised straight through, in no order, until every name blurs into every other.

So impose three rules on it before you start.

First, separate discovering from inventing. A discovery finds something that was already there — X-rays, the electron, penicillin, the circulation of blood. An invention builds something that did not exist — the telephone, the bulb, the aeroplane. Papers use the two verbs precisely, so an option can be a real scientist attached to the wrong verb.

Second, sort by field rather than by alphabet. Physics names cluster, medicine names cluster, and a name recalled inside its field is far easier to reach than one floating alone.

Third, keep the confusable pairs together on purpose. Becquerel and the Curies. Thomson and Chadwick. Bell and Marconi. Bhabha and Sarabhai. These pairs are the whole difficulty of the chapter, and separating them is what makes them swap.

SSC CGL and CHSL, RRB NTPC and Group D, BPSC TRE-4 general studies and the CTET science paper all ask several of these in every sitting.

1. Who discovered penicillin in 1928?

2. X-rays were discovered in 1895 by whom?

3. The neutron was discovered by which scientist?

4. Who is regarded as the father of the computer?

5. Which Indian scientist won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for the scattering effect named after him?

6. Who invented the telephone?

7. The periodic table of elements was formulated by which scientist?

8. Who is known as the father of India's space programme?