Communication Trivia
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106 free Communication trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every leap in human communication left a great trivia question behind: the four words Samuel Morse tapped out in 1844, the two words in the first text message, the reason the @ sign is in every email address, and why a Danish king's nickname is on your headphones. This communication trivia quiz walks through the whole history, from cuneiform and the Rosetta Stone through printing, postage stamps, semaphore, the telegraph and telephone, radio and television, and on to the internet, mobile phones, emoji and hashtags. There are also questions on the languages and codes people built to be understood: Braille, American Sign Language, Esperanto, the NATO phonetic alphabet, SOS, Mayday and 10-4, plus a few on communication theory, from Marshall McLuhan's most famous line to the 7-38-55 rule and Claude Shannon's 1948 paper. It suits a technology round at a pub quiz, a classroom unit on media history, or a team icebreaker for anyone whose job involves talking to other people. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedic and primary sources before publishing, and each question carries a citation.
30 of 106 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which book was the first major work off Johannes Gutenberg's printing press?
The Bible
The Bible, in Latin, ran to about 180 copies. Around the time it was finished, Gutenberg's backer Johann Fust sued over his loans and won control of the Bible workshop.
Q 02What first message did Samuel Morse telegraph from Washington to Baltimore on 24 May 1844?
What hath God wrought
'What hath God wrought' was picked from the Book of Numbers by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the patent commissioner who had championed Morse's invention; it ran from the Capitol to a railway depot in Baltimore.
Q 03On what date was Alexander Graham Bell awarded the first US patent for the telephone?
7 March 1876
US Patent 174,465 was issued on 7 March 1876, a few days before Bell's famous 'Mr Watson, come here' call; Meucci, Reis, Bourseul and Elisha Gray have all also been credited with inventing the device.
Q 04Alexander Graham Bell wanted callers to say 'Ahoy'; which rival inventor made 'hello' the standard telephone greeting?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison argued in an 1877 letter that telephones needed no call bell because 'Hello!' could be heard 10 to 20 feet away; the first exchanges then put the word in their operating manuals.
Q 05Ray Tomlinson's 1971 test message between two computers standing side by side was the first networked what?
Email between different computers began with a note Tomlinson called entirely forgettable. He also chose the @ sign to split the user's name from the machine's, because no username contained it.
Q 06What did the very first SMS text message, sent over the Vodafone network in 1992, say?
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas was typed on a computer by 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth and sent to the Orbitel handset of Vodafone director Richard Jarvis, who was at his office Christmas party, on 3 December 1992.
Q 07Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?
CERN
At CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Berners-Lee wanted a way to share documents across a large, constantly changing lab; CERN put the Web software in the public domain in 1993.
Q 08The Pony Express cut coast-to-coast message time to about ten days, but operated for only how long?
18 months
The Pony Express ran about 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861, closing two days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed; it was quickly romanticised into Old West legend.
Q 09Before the Penny Black, the first adhesive postage stamp, who normally paid for a letter in Britain?
The recipient
The recipient paid on delivery, charged by distance and by the number of sheets. Rowland Hill's 1840 reform turned that round: the sender prepaid a flat penny, and the stamp was the proof.
Q 10Claude Chappe's 1790s chain of towers, which passed messages with pivoting arms, was what kind of system?
Semaphore
Semaphore towers stood a few miles apart: each operator read the next tower's arm positions through a telescope and copied them on, so a message could outrun any rider on horseback.
Q 11How many dot positions are there in a standard braille cell?
Six
Six dots is half of what came before: Louis Braille was only 15 when he cut down the 12-dot cells of Charles Barbier's raised code, and he published his own system in 1829.
Q 12The word 'emoji' comes from Japanese words meaning what?
Picture and character
Picture and character is the literal meaning, from Japanese e plus moji; the likeness to the English words 'emotion' and 'emoticon' is pure coincidence.
Q 13The :-) smiley was proposed on a Carnegie Mellon message board in 1982 to mark which kind of post?
Jokes
Jokes kept being taken seriously on the board, one of them as a real safety warning, so Scott Fahlman suggested :-) as a 'joke marker' and :-( for posts that were not jokes.
Q 21What was Twitter's original character limit per post, in force until 2017?
140
The limit was 140 characters, chosen so a post plus username fitted inside the 160-character SMS limit; the service had launched in July 2006 as 'twttr'.
Q 22Which invented language did eye doctor Ludwik Zamenhof publish in 1887?
Esperanto
Esperanto means 'one who hopes', the pen name Zamenhof signed his first book with. He grew up in multi-ethnic Białystok, then in the Russian Empire, and believed a shared language would ease the hatreds between peoples.
Q 23The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and which third script?
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek, which scholars could already read, gave Champollion and Young their key; the stone was found in July 1799 by an officer in Napoleon's army in Egypt and has been displayed at the British Museum since 1802.
Q 14Which emoji was chosen as Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in 2015?
Face with Tears of Joy
Face with Tears of Joy was the first pictograph chosen; Oxford and SwiftKey found it made up about 20 per cent of all emoji used in the UK in 2015.
Q 15In the US postal system, what does ZIP stand for?
Zone Improvement Plan
Zone Improvement Plan was a name built for its acronym, to suggest mail zipping along; the five-digit codes arrived in 1963 with a cartoon mailman, Mr ZIP, fronting a long publicity campaign to get people using them.
Q 16Which Scottish inventor patented an 'Electric Printing Telegraph', ancestor of the fax, in 1843?
Alexander Bain
Bain reproduced graphic signs in the lab by 1846; the telephone was still three decades away.
Q 17Which satellite, launched in July 1962, relayed the first live transatlantic television feed?
Telstar 1
Telstar 1 worked for only a few months: radiation from nuclear tests in space, one of them a US blast the day before its launch, is thought to have wrecked its transistors, and it fell silent for good in early 1963.
Q 18The first ARPANET host-to-host connection, on 29 October 1969, linked UCLA with which other site?
Stanford Research Institute
Stanford Research Institute received just two letters: UCLA student Charley Kline was logging in when the system crashed after 'LO', which so became the first message on the network that grew into the internet.
Q 19Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellphone call in 1973 while working for which company?
Motorola
Motorola's Martin Cooper rang his rival Joel Engel at Bell Labs from a Manhattan sidewalk on 3 April 1973 using a DynaTAC prototype; the phone did not reach the market until 1983.
Q 20Who first proposed using hashtags on Twitter, in a 2007 tweet?
Chris Messina
He never tried to patent the idea, saying hashtags 'were born of the internet, and owned by no one'.
Q 24Cuneiform, often called the earliest writing system, was first developed to write which language?
Sumerian
Sumerian was the language of southern Mesopotamia, where scribes pressed a reed into wet clay; the wedge-shaped marks give cuneiform its name, from the Latin for wedge, and were later borrowed to write Akkadian.
Q 25Cai Lun, a Chinese court official, is traditionally credited with inventing which material around 105 CE?
Paper
Paper from tree bark, hemp waste, old rags and fishing nets was Cai Lun's recipe; it was far cheaper than the silk then used for writing, and although older scraps exist, his method made large-scale production possible.
Q 26Which American gunmaker put the first typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard on sale in 1874?
Remington
Remington, an arms maker looking for new products, built the Sholes and Glidden machine at its Ilion works; it typed capitals only until the Remington No. 2 of 1878 added a shift key.
Q 27The NATO phonetic alphabet (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie...) was defined in 1955-56 by which organisation?
The International Civil Aviation Organization
The International Civil Aviation Organization settled the final list in 1956 after reworking a 1951 version in which C, M and N were Coca, Metro and Nectar; NATO's forces switched to the new words that March.
Q 28Which Canadian thinker coined the phrases 'the medium is the message' and 'global village' in the 1960s?
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan kept a printer's mistake, by his son's account: when a typesetter turned the title of his 1967 book into The Medium Is the Massage, he said 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!'
Q 29Claude Shannon's 1948 article 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' introduced which unit of information?
The bit
The bit was not Shannon's own word: he credited colleague John Tukey, who had shortened 'binary digit' in a Bell Labs memo the year before.
Q 30In which Alabama town was the first 911 emergency call in the United States made, in 1968?
Haleyville
Rankin Fite, Speaker of the Alabama House, placed the call in Haleyville on 16 February 1968, answered by Congressman Tom Bevill; AT&T had announced 911 as the national number a month earlier.