74 questions
Each test holds the same questions every time, so you can take them in any order.
This theme is not a story. It is a long list of people and what each of them made or found out, so the notes below group them by the kind of thing rather than running them in date order. Matching a name to an invention is what the questions test, and a date order would separate names that belong together.
Industry and money. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with Adam Smith on economics and James Watt on steam power. Cottage industries, where people worked at home making things like cloth and lace, then the Industrial Revolution, which new machines and steam made possible and which Britain went through at scale earlier than anywhere else. The Bessemer process for making steel in quantity, canals to link factories with towns and ports, and Richard Arkwright, who trained as a barber, improved the carding machine and is remembered above all for the way he ran his factories. John Maynard Keynes published new economic thinking between the two world wars.
Getting about. George and Robert Stephenson, a father and son, were the railway engine pioneers, working just before Victoria came to the throne. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was an engineer and built the Great Western Railway. Further back, Francis Drake's ship the Golden Hind was among the earliest to sail round the world, and Captain James Cook charted the Australian coast.
Early science. Isaac Newton showed in Principia Mathematica that gravity reaches into every corner of the universe, and found that white light is every colour of the rainbow together. Edmund Halley, one of the first fellows of the Royal Society, predicted the date a comet would come round again. One question goes back further still and asks who first minted coins in Britain, which was Iron Age people.
Medicine. Florence Nightingale is the founder of modern nursing and set up her training school at St Thomas' Hospital in 1860. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 while he was researching flu, and Howard Florey and Ernst Chain made it into something that could be given to a patient. Insulin was co-discovered by John MacLeod. The structure of DNA was worked out in 1953, and Francis Crick is the British scientist named for it. Peter Mansfield helped invent the MRI scanner. Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe pioneered IVF, and the first test-tube baby born anywhere arrived in Oldham in 1978. Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first mammal ever cloned.
Machines and communication. Ernest Rutherford led the team that first split the atom. Frank Whittle developed the jet engine in the 1930s. John Logie Baird developed the television and made the first broadcast between London and Glasgow. Alan Turing invented the theoretical device that carries his name. Bernard Lovell was the scientist behind Jodrell Bank, the radio telescope in Cheshire. Christopher Cockerell came up with the hovercraft in the 1950s. Concorde was built by Britain and France together, and the Harrier jump jet can take off vertically. James Goodfellow invented the cash machine. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and information first travelled across it on 25 December 1990.
Two corners sit outside all of that. Sake Dean Mahomet opened the Hindoostane Coffee House in London in 1810 and brought shampooing, an Indian head massage, to Britain. And two questions arrive through television and broadcasting rather than through invention, one on what kind of programme Coronation Street and EastEnders are and one on the balance the law requires of broadcasters covering the political parties. Do not go looking for an inventor in either of those.
Almost all of them are a name matched to a thing, in one direction or the other. Given the invention, name the person. Given the person, name the invention. Fewer questions here turn on a year than in the history themes, so the effort is better spent on people than on dates. A handful go one step further and ask a detail about the person, where they were born or what they did beforehand, which is why it pays to learn a little around each name rather than just the pairing.
Who found it and who made it work. Fleming discovered penicillin. Florey and Chain developed it into something that could be given to a patient. Both sides are asked, and they are not the same answer.
Names that come in pairs. George and Robert Stephenson, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. Learning one half of a pair leaves you guessing on the other, and some questions name one and ask for the other.
Two railway men. The Stephensons built the engine. Brunel was the engineer who built the line, the Great Western Railway out of Paddington.
Where people were born. Three questions ask this and the answers are not the obvious ones. Florence Nightingale was born in Italy. Alexander Fleming was born in Scotland. Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire.
Three sets of initials. ATM is automatic teller machine, MRI is magnetic resonance imaging, IVF is in-vitro fertilisation. Each has a question of its own, and ATM has a second one asking for the everyday British word, which is cashpoint.
The title tells you nothing. Some of these names carry a Sir in the handbook and plenty do not. Fleming, Turing, Baird and Crick do not. In the IVF pair and the Dolly pair only one of the two has it. Go by the surname.
One question asks which county Jodrell Bank is in, and the answer, Cheshire, is still perfectly correct. What has dated is the handbook's description around it. The Lovell Telescope still works, but it is no longer the largest in the world. It held that title for years after it opened in 1957 and has since been passed, including by the bigger FAST telescope in China, which opened in 2016.
The other is a spelling. The handbook prints Sir Edmund Halley and that is the form the test uses, so that is the form to pick. The astronomer himself spelled his first name Edmond, and he was never knighted. Answer the book. When either of these comes up in practice, a Worth knowing note appears beside the answer with the fuller picture.
Pick this one if names are what you keep losing, because it is the theme that is almost entirely names and it is a good place to find out whether the problem is recall or confusion. It shares a period with Empire, Migration and the Wider World, which covers the trade and the empire that the industrial years were built on, though no question belongs to both, so neither will do the other's work for you. Nearly all of this theme sits in chapter 3, which is the wider track to take if the whole history chapter is the problem.