Electricity
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100 free Electricity trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
43 free Electricity trivia questions with answers. The word 'electric' comes from the Greek for amber, because the Greeks noticed that rubbed amber picked up feathers. From that party trick came the voltaic pile, Faraday's motor, Edison's Pearl Street plant, the AC-versus-DC war, the grid, and a South American fish that can knock out a horse. This quiz covers the science and the story: static and the triboelectric effect, Franklin's kite and the poor scientist who died copying it, Galvani's frogs and Volta's battery, Ørsted's twitching compass needle, Faraday and Ohm and Ampère, why the units are named as they are, Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse, the light bulb's bamboo filament, lightning's temperature and frequency, electric eels, superconductors, why Japan runs on two frequencies, the 2003 blackout and more. Easy questions on the basics, harder ones on the history and numbers. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation sits under each explanation, so nothing rests on half-remembered physics class.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'electricity' derives from 'elektron', the ancient Greek word for what?
Amber
Amber rubbed with fur attracts small objects such as feathers, an effect noticed in ancient Greece, so its Greek name was borrowed in 1600 for the new science of electricity.
Q 02Whose 1600 book De Magnete first carefully separated static electricity from magnetism?
William Gilbert
William Gilbert, later physician to Elizabeth I, built the versorium, a pivoting pointer that could detect electric charge, and argued that the Earth itself is one great magnet.
Q 03Benjamin Franklin is said to have flown a kite in a storm in June 1752 with what tied to the string?
A metal key
A metal key hung from the kite string; by Joseph Priestley's later account, Franklin saw the loose threads of the string stand on end and drew a spark from the key with his knuckle.
Q 04Which physicist was killed in St Petersburg in 1753 while trying a version of Franklin's lightning experiment?
Georg Wilhelm Richmann
Georg Wilhelm Richmann was watching his apparatus during a storm when a discharge, reported to be ball lightning, struck his head; he is thought to be the first person killed in electrical research.
Q 05Luigi Galvani discovered in 1780 that the legs of dead frogs did what when touched by an electric spark?
Twitched
The legs twitched as if alive, which Galvani put down to 'animal electricity'; talk of such sparks reviving the dead is said to have helped inspire Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Q 06Volta's 1800 voltaic pile was made from alternating discs of copper and which other metal?
Zinc
Zinc and copper discs were stacked with brine-soaked card between each pair; Napoleon was so taken with Volta's demonstration of the pile in Paris that he later made him a count.
Q 07Besides inventing the battery, Volta is credited with discovering which gas?
Methane
Methane was the gas Volta collected in 1776 from bubbles rising out of the marshy shallows of Lake Maggiore; he then showed that an electric spark could set it alight.
Q 08In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted found that switching on an electric current did what?
Deflected a compass needle
Deflected a compass needle: the swing was the first proof that electricity and magnetism are linked, and within weeks it set Ampère working out the mathematics of the force.
Q 09Michael Faraday began his working life as an apprentice in which trade?
Bookbinding
Bookbinding let Faraday read the books that passed through the shop; he then sent Humphry Davy a bound copy of his notes on Davy's lectures and won a job as his assistant.
Q 10Which everyday electrical terms did Faraday help popularise?
Anode, cathode, electrode and ion
Anode, cathode, electrode and ion reached print through Faraday in 1834; he had asked the scholar William Whewell, who also coined 'scientist', to devise most of them.
Q 11In Ohm's law, written V = IR, what does the R stand for?
Resistance
Resistance is measured in ohms, after Georg Ohm, who worked the law out in the 1820s as a schoolteacher, experimenting in the physics laboratory of the Cologne school where he taught.
Q 12The ampere is named after a physicist from which country?
France
France: Ampère, a mathematical prodigy from Lyon, lost his father to the guillotine in the Revolution, then in 1820 worked out how wires carrying currents attract and repel each other.
Q 13The SI unit of power, the watt, honours James Watt for his improvements to what?
The steam engine
The steam engine wasted much of its steam reheating a cylinder that was cooled on every stroke; Watt's separate condenser kept the cylinder hot, so far less coal was burned.
Q 21Satellite counts put the number of lightning flashes on Earth each second at roughly what?
About 44
About 44 flashes a second, or nearly 1.4 billion a year, is the tally from satellite sensors; it replaced an estimate of 100 a second, made in 1925, that had stood for decades.
Q 22Which place has the highest lightning rate on Earth, thanks to the Catatumbo storms?
Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela
Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela: at night, mountain breezes off the Andes meet warm, moist air over the lake and set off storms, a pattern that knocked the Congo Basin off the top spot.
Q 23Electric eels can deliver shocks of up to roughly how many volts?
860
Q 14James Clerk Maxwell definitively linked electricity, magnetism and what else in the 1860s?
Light
Light turned out to be an electromagnetic wave, and Maxwell's theory predicted invisible waves of the same kind, which Heinrich Hertz first produced in the 1880s: radio waves.
Q 15By historical convention, electric current is defined as flowing in which direction?
From positive to negative
From positive to negative: Franklin fixed the labels long before the electron was discovered, so in a metal wire the charges that really move travel the opposite way.
Q 16The electron was discovered in 1897 by which physicist, working with cathode rays?
J.J. Thomson
J.J. Thomson won the 1906 Nobel Prize after showing the electron to be a particle; his son George shared the 1937 prize for showing that electrons also behave as waves.
Q 17The electric field driving electrons through a wire propagates at close to what?
The speed of light
The speed of light is nearly matched by the signal, so a lamp answers its switch at once, yet the electrons themselves drift along the wire at only a fraction of a millimetre a second.
Q 18Among pure metals at room temperature, which alone conducts electricity better than copper?
Silver
Silver is the best electrical conductor of all the metals, but only slightly better than copper and far more expensive, so copper does the wiring and silver is kept for small electronic parts.
Q 19What is the name for charge transfer through rubbing, which explains static shocks from doorknobs?
The triboelectric effect
The triboelectric effect moves electrons between surfaces that touch and part: a balloon rubbed on hair picks up extra electrons, which is why it will then cling to a wall.
Q 20The air around a lightning flash heats to roughly what temperature?
About 30,000 °C
About 30,000 °C, roughly five times hotter than the surface of the Sun; the air expands so violently that it sends out the shock wave we hear as thunder.
Up to 860 volts was recorded in 2019 from a newly recognised species named after Volta; despite the name, electric eels are knifefish, not true eels.
Q 24Thomas Edison's first commercial power plant, Pearl Street Station, opened in 1882 in which city?
New York
New York's Pearl Street Station lost all but one of its dynamos to a fire in 1890; the survivor is now a museum piece in Michigan.
Q 25Edison's first patent covered a machine that recorded what?
Votes
Votes: the electric vote recorder, meant for legislatures, was a commercial failure, and Edison resolved from then on to invent only things he was sure people would want.
Q 26Edison's team found a carbonised filament of which material could burn for about 1,200 hours?
Japanese bamboo
Japanese bamboo far outlasted the carbonised cotton thread of Edison's first successful lamp, which had burned out in under 15 hours, and it stayed his standard filament for about ten years.
Q 27An old-style incandescent bulb turns most of the electricity it uses into what?
Heat
Heat takes at least 90% of the power, because a filament has to glow white-hot to shine at all; that waste is why LED lamps have largely replaced the incandescent bulb.
Q 28In the 'war of the currents', which industrialist backed AC against Edison's direct current?
George Westinghouse
George Westinghouse, inventor of the railway air brake, bought Tesla's AC motor patents and went on to illuminate the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with alternating current.
Q 29The 1892 merger of Edison's company with its biggest rival created which corporation?
General Electric
General Electric was born when the banker J.P. Morgan helped merge Edison General Electric with Thomson-Houston; the new company dropped Edison's name.
Q 30Nikola Tesla, an ethnic Serb, was born in 1856 in Smiljan, a village now in which country?
Croatia
Croatia: Smiljan was then part of the Austrian Empire. Tesla's father, an Orthodox priest, wanted him to join the clergy but promised him engineering school if he survived a bout of cholera.