1900s
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96 free 1900s trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
14 free 1900s trivia questions with answers. Step back in time with our engaging 1900s trivia quiz! Test your knowledge of the early twentieth century, from groundbreaking inventions to pivotal historical moments. With 9 challenging questions, this quiz covers the people, events, and culture that shaped the 1900s.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Near which North Carolina village did the Wright brothers make the first powered flights in December 1903?
Kitty Hawk
Kitty Hawk was chosen after Wilbur studied Weather Bureau wind records and heard of its steady breezes and soft sand; the flights left from the Kill Devil Hills dunes four miles to the south.
Q 02Which major US city was levelled by an earthquake and the fires that followed on April 18, 1906?
San Francisco
San Francisco burned for days because the quake had broken the water mains, leaving firefighters short of water; the fires destroyed some 500 city blocks.
Q 03What was Albert Einstein's day job when he published special relativity in 1905?
Patent examiner
Patent examiner was the post Einstein took at the Swiss Patent Office after failing to find a teaching job; he worked out the 1905 papers that remade physics in his spare time.
Q 04Which city hosted the Summer Olympic Games in 1900?
Paris
Paris ran the 1900 Games as a sideshow to its World's Fair, spread over five months and so little advertised that many athletes never knew they had competed in the Olympics.
Q 05Which iconic automobile, known for its impact on mass production, was first introduced in 1908?
Ford Model T
The Ford Model T went on sale on October 1, 1908 at $850; assembly-line production later cut the price to under $300 by 1925, putting a car within reach of ordinary wage-earners.
Q 06What do Westerners call the anti-foreign, anti-Christian Chinese uprising of around 1900?
Boxer Rebellion
The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) was led by the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists across North China; Westerners called its martial-arts-practising members 'Boxers'.
Q 07The Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901, were funded by the fortune of the man who invented what?
Dynamite
Dynamite made Alfred Nobel rich, and his will left most of the fortune to fund the prizes; his family fought the bequest, so the first awards came only in 1901, five years after his death.
Q 08What was the name of the first fully synthetic plastic, invented in 1907?
Bakelite
Bakelite, named after its inventor Leo Baekeland, shrugged off heat and electricity, so it soon formed the non-conducting parts of radios, light sockets and telephones.
Q 09Which British campaign adopted militant direct action under Emmeline Pankhurst from 1903?
Suffragette Movement
The Suffragette Movement took its name from the press: a Daily Mail reporter coined 'suffragette' in 1906, perhaps as a put-down, and Pankhurst's militants made it their own, even naming their newspaper after it.
Q 10Who became president following William McKinley's assassination, taking office at the age of 42?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt had been steered into the vice presidency by his own state's party boss, who wanted the reforming governor out of the way; six months later McKinley's death made him president at 42.
Q 11In July 1909 Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an aeroplane across which stretch of water?
The English Channel
The English Channel took Blériot 36 and a half minutes to cross, from near Calais to Dover; he flew without a compass and collected a prize the Daily Mail had put up for the first crossing.
Q 12Which civil rights organization was founded in 1909 by a group that included W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells?
The NAACP
The NAACP answered the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln's home town; its founders issued their call on the centenary of his birth, 12 February 1909.
Q 13Which Spanish artist painted the 1907 canvas Les Demoiselles d'Avignon?
Pablo Picasso
Q 21Which cycling race was held for the first time in 1903?
Tour de France
The Tour de France was invented by the struggling sports paper L'Auto to boost its circulation; Maurice Garin won the first edition, raced over just six long stages.
Q 22Which 12-minute western of 1903, directed by Edwin S. Porter, became one of American cinema's first big hits?
The Great Train Robbery
The Great Train Robbery played in nickelodeons across America for years; its best-known shot, an outlaw firing his pistol straight at the audience, could be shown at the start or at the end.
Q 23The first modern World Series, in 1903, was won by the 'Americans', a club now known by what name?
Boston Red Sox
Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907; its mask-like faces, shaped by Iberian and African art, opened the road to Cubism.
Q 14Where did Marconi report hearing the first wireless signal sent across the Atlantic, in December 1901?
Newfoundland
Newfoundland was a fallback: storms had damaged Marconi's planned station on Cape Cod, so he listened from Signal Hill in St John's, with his aerial held up by a kite, for the Morse letter S.
Q 15Which country, then ruled by Russia's tsar, became the first in Europe to give women the vote in 1906?
Finland
Finland went further than the vote: its 1906 reform also let women stand for office, and the next year's election sent 19 of them to parliament, the first women MPs anywhere.
Q 16The first feature-length film, released in Melbourne in 1906, told which outlaw's story?
Ned Kelly
Ned Kelly's last stand was the climax of The Story of the Kelly Gang, which ran for more than an hour when most films lasted minutes; only fragments of it, about 17 minutes, survive.
Q 17The Tunguska event of June 1908 flattened roughly 2,000 square kilometres of forest in which region?
Siberia
Siberia's Tunguska blast is blamed on an asteroid that exploded in mid-air: the first scientists to reach the site, in 1927, found forest flattened for miles around but no crater.
Q 18Which Sicilian city, along with Calabria, was devastated by the 1908 earthquake and tsunami?
Messina
Messina was struck at about 5:20 in the morning, so most people were asleep indoors when their houses collapsed on them, and a tsunami then swept the ruined waterfront.
Q 19Which Balkan country declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in October 1908, its prince taking the title of tsar?
Bulgaria
Bulgaria had run its own affairs since 1878 but was still nominally Ottoman; Prince Ferdinand timed his declaration with Austria-Hungary, which annexed Bosnia the very next day.
Q 20The first zeppelin flight took place on 2 July 1900 over which body of water?
Lake Constance
Lake Constance held Count Zeppelin's floating hangar: moored at one end, it swung to face the wind, which made it easier to ease the fragile LZ 1 out for its first flight on 2 July 1900.
The Boston Red Sox, still called the Americans, trailed three games to one in 1903 and then won four in a row, Cy Young and Bill Dinneen taking two wins apiece.
Q 24Which National League champions, with Honus Wagner at shortstop, lost the first modern World Series in 1903?
Pittsburgh Pirates
The Pittsburgh Pirates won three of the first four games, all pitched by Deacon Phillippe, but with their other ace injured he had to pitch five times, and they lost the best-of-nine series.
Q 25The teddy bear was named after an incident on a November 1902 bear hunt in which Southern state?
Mississippi
Near Onward, Mississippi, the president refused to shoot a bear that had been caught and tied to a tree for him; Clifford Berryman's Washington Post cartoon made the moment famous.
Q 26Which German toy company began making plush bears in 1902, just as the teddy bear craze took off in America?
Steiff
Steiff's bear was designed by Richard Steiff, the founder's nephew; an American buyer ordered 3,000 of them in 1903, while in Brooklyn Morris Michtom was selling his own 'Teddy's bear'.
Q 27The 1904 Olympics were the first held outside Europe and were staged in which city?
St. Louis
Chicago had won the bid, but the 1904 Games moved to St. Louis to coincide with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, making them the first Olympics outside Europe.
Q 28Which now-standard Olympic tradition was introduced at the 1904 Games?
Gold, silver and bronze medals
Gold, silver and bronze medals for the first three places were new in 1904; American gymnast George Eyser won six medals at those Games despite having a wooden left leg.
Q 29Which European state annexed the Congo Free State from its king's personal rule in 1908?
Belgium
Belgium annexed the Congo Free State on 15 November 1908, ending Leopold II's personal rule after international outcry over atrocities in the rubber trade.
Q 30Which company launched the one-dollar Brownie camera in 1900?
Kodak
Kodak named its cheap cardboard box camera after the Brownies, Palmer Cox's popular cartoon sprites, and aimed it at children; the idea was to sell them roll after roll of film.