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60 free Clock trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Clocks are one of the oldest technologies we still use every day, and their history is full of stories: a Chinese tower clock in 1088, a carpenter who solved longitude, a bell that cracked and kept ringing, and a nine-minute snooze that nobody has changed since 1956. This quiz has 52 free clock trivia questions with answers. It starts easy (what 'clock' originally meant, which region gave us the cuckoo clock, what Big Ben really is) and gets properly hard: the first spring-driven clock's royal owner, the German merchant who first described a cuckoo clock, the year the Doomsday Clock was furthest from midnight, and the county behind the song that named the grandfather clock. Escapements, quartz, caesium and clockwise-versus-counterclockwise all get a turn. Each answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on clocks, Big Ben, John Harrison and the rest, and every question carries a citation, so it is safe to use for a pub quiz round or a classroom.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'clock' comes from the medieval Latin clocca, meaning what?
Bell
Early tower clocks had no dials at all; they simply rang the hours, so the name for the bell became the name for the machine.
Q 02Along with sundials, which device is possibly the oldest time-measuring instrument?
The water clock
Simple outflow bowls existed in Babylon and Egypt around the 16th century BC.
Q 03Which invention made the first mechanical clocks possible in Europe around 1300?
The verge escapement
An escapement lets the driving force out in regular ticks; the verge and foliot did that job for three centuries.
Q 04Which English cathedral houses the 1386 clock thought to be the oldest surviving mechanical clock that strikes hours?
Salisbury
It has no face; it was built purely to strike a bell.
Q 05Which 11th-century Chinese polymath built a ten-metre astronomical clock tower in Kaifeng in 1088?
Su Song
His water-driven tower used an escapement mechanism centuries before Europe's mechanical clocks.
Q 06The earliest surviving spring-driven clock was made around 1430 for which ruler?
Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy
Spring power freed clocks from hanging weights and eventually made watches possible.
Q 07Clockmaking flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries in which two German metalworking towns?
Nuremberg and Augsburg
Nuremberg's Peter Henlein is often credited with early portable watches.
Q 08Who is usually credited with inventing the pendulum clock in 1656?
Christiaan Huygens
He also worked out that a pendulum about 99.4 cm long swings once per second.
Q 09Roughly how long is a pendulum that takes one second per swing?
99 cm
That is why so many longcase clocks are the height they are: they were built around a seconds pendulum.
Q 10Which English clockmaker created the longcase clock and the anchor escapement around 1670?
William Clement
The anchor escapement let a pendulum swing in a small arc, which made long, accurate pendulums practical.
Q 11The 1675 invention of the spiral balance spring, or hairspring, finally made what possible?
Accurate pocket watches
Thomas Tompion was among the first to use it successfully in his watches.
Q 12How much did the British government offer in 1714 for a way to determine longitude accurately?
£20,000
John Harrison spent decades chasing the reward and eventually received large sums under the Longitude Act.
Q 13What was John Harrison's original trade before he turned to clockmaking?
Carpenter
His early longcase clocks were made almost entirely of wood.
Q 21As of 2013, which element's atomic clocks were the most stable in existence?
Ytterbium
They are stable to within less than two parts in a quintillion.
Q 22Strictly speaking, what does the name 'Big Ben' refer to?
The Great Bell
The nickname spread to the whole tower, which was officially just the Clock Tower until 2012.
Q 23In 2012 the structure housing Big Ben was renamed what?
Elizabeth Tower
The renaming marked Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.
Q 24In what year was the tower housing Big Ben completed?
Q 14Harrison's H4 watch was tested on a 1761-62 voyage to Jamaica. How far out was it on arrival?
About 5 seconds
That equated to an error of roughly one nautical mile, far better than the prize demanded.
Q 15Harrison's nearly frictionless, oil-free escapement is named after which creature?
Grasshopper
He also invented the gridiron pendulum, which compensated for temperature changes.
Q 16Whose 1995 bestseller Longitude brought Harrison's story to a wide audience?
Dava Sobel
It is described as the first popular bestseller on the subject of horology.
Q 17Which Scottish clockmaker patented the electric clock in 1840?
Alexander Bain
He followed it a year later with the electromagnetic pendulum.
Q 18The first quartz clock was built in 1927 at which company?
Bell Labs
Warren Marrison and J.W. Horton built it, exploiting the piezoelectric effect the Curies had found in 1880.
Q 19Which company produced the world's first quartz wristwatch, the Astron, in 1969?
Seiko
Within a decade the quartz crisis had gutted the Swiss mechanical watch industry.
Q 20Who built the first accurate caesium atomic clock in 1955?
Louis Essen
He built it at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, six years after a prototype ammonia maser at the US Bureau of Standards.
1859
Construction had begun in 1843 after fire destroyed the old Palace of Westminster.
Q 25How much does the bell nicknamed Big Ben weigh?
13.5 tons
It cracked soon after installation and was turned an eighth of a turn so the hammer struck elsewhere.
Q 26How is Big Ben's clock traditionally kept to time?
Pennies placed on the pendulum
Adding one old penny speeds the clock by about two-fifths of a second a day.
Q 27How long is each minute hand on Big Ben's clock?
14 feet
The dials themselves are 22.5 feet across, on a tower 316 feet tall.
Q 28Big Ben's quarter-hour chimes are known by what name?
The Westminster Quarters
The tune came from Cambridge and is said to be based on a phrase from Handel's Messiah.
Q 29Which region of Germany popularised the cuckoo clock and exported it worldwide?
The Black Forest
Despite The Third Man's famous line, Switzerland is not the cuckoo clock's birthplace.
Q 30Who gave the first known description of a modern cuckoo clock, in 1629?
Philipp Hainhofer
The Augsburg merchant saw one in Dresden's cabinet of curiosities.