Can you score 100 on this tech history quiz?

Ask any of the underpaid and underqualified people working inside this AT&T store what the letters AT&T stand for. They won't know. Do you?
Yes and if that AT&T employee is particularly clever--or smarmy--they may say something like "AT&T stands for integrity and customer service." No no no. What you want them to tell you is just what the LETTERS AT&T stand for. They'll stare at you as if you just asked the stupidest question ever. And working in a phone store, they've heard some stupid questions.
So, never mind them. Do YOU know what the letters AT&T stand for? Is it:
American Tech & Telephone
Amherst Telecommunications & Technology
American Telephone & Telegraph
So, that's right, it's. . . TELEGRAPH. Telephone and Telegraph. Before smart guys figured out how to send the human voice over a wire--the Telephone--they had figured out--around 1832--how to send blips over a wire. Clicks. Specifically, two different kinds of clicks, a long one and a short one. Somebody took the alphabet and made up a code for each of the letters, involving sequences of these clicks. So messages could be spelled out and sent, over a wire, one letter at a time. What was the name of the person who thought up this code?
Ashley Thornwhistle
Samuel Finley Breese Morse
Hillary J. Squarepants
Well, it's got to be the middle one, right? --- Who would make up a name like that? So yes, it's the middle one, Morse.
And what do we call his code? Is it...?
Samuel Code
The Hammurabi Code
Morse Code
Now if you don't know this one, I guess this stuff is all new to you. You could work at AT&T! ---
It's Morse Code, of course.
And the system for sending this Morse Code over wires was called Telegraph. Telegraph is a word concocted from two Greek words, the first of which, "tele-" means "far off, at a distance." The second word, "graph," is a word that means writing. So "telegraph" means "writing at a distance." Like a letter, but faster.
What the Greeks originally meant by this word "graph" or "graphia" was:
Cartoon drawings of political figures with exaggerated features
To scrape or scratch on a clay tablet with a stylus
A quill pen
Yes, this is a hard one. The correct answer is --- the scraping and scratching on a tablet. And it came to mean the process of writing or recording something.
So in the 19th century world, telegraph was high tech. All of electronics, as we know it, traces its roots back to the telegraph.
Then in 1875 there was a Scotsman up in Canada who figured out how to send the human voice over a wire... a kind of "acoustic telegraph." That guy's name was:
Alexander Graham Cracker
Alexander Golden Grahams
Alexander Graham Bell
Annnnnd --- That's right, it was Bell who invented what came to be known as the telephone. You knew that one. Telephone. There's that Greek again. "Tele" for distance, and "Phone" for voice or sound. And so as "telegraph" is writing at a distance, "telephone" is voice at a distance. ((phone rings, double ring)) We can all be grateful that it was Bell who invented the telephone. Why be grateful it was Bell? Because his cousin was working on the same idea and if the cousin had been first, instead of Bell, then the sound a telephone would make when somebody called would be very different. What was the cousin's name?
Mortimer Graham Siren
Phineas J. Shriek
Gertrude Piercingwhine
Yes, that was ENTIRELY a trick question, based on nothing more than a pathetic quest for laughs.
So we see that communication over a wire was a really big deal in the 19th century. About the highest-tech thing going. But there was a dream beyond that. Smart guys and gals dreamed of communicating at a distance WITHOUT wires. And the pioneers in this effort, like Heinrich Hertz in 1886, succeeded in getting pulses of electricity to go through the air without wires.
Hertz thought this breakthrough meant which of the following:
Electrical distribution could be done without wires OR
Radio broadcasting could be achieved OR
Nothing. He thought it meant nothing.
And the answer is: When Hertz was asked what practical applications might be made of his discovery, he answered --- that it was of no use whatsoever. Nothing.
But it wasn't nothing. It triggered experimentation by scientific types around the world and was the basis of what they soon began to call radiotelegraphy.
But they may as well have named it Infectuous Mononucleosis. The public was no way going to use the name "radiotelegraphy." The name that caught on with the public was. . .
Wirefree
Wireless
Mono
--- Yes, it was wireless. And that's what radio was called in the early days, wireless. The word "radio" comes from the Latin word "radius," meaning "beam." Radio was not a word used alone at first. It was used as a part of which word combination?:
Radiophone
Radio-telegraphy
Radio-receiver
And the answer is --- all three! Boy, this is a tricky quiz.