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50 free Electricity trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01The word 'electricity' derives from 'elektron', the ancient Greek word for what?
Amber
William Gilbert coined 'electricus' in 1600 for the way rubbed amber attracts light objects; Thales had noted the effect around 600 BCE.
Q 02Whose 1600 book De Magnete first carefully separated static electricity from magnetism?
William Gilbert
Before Gilbert, electricity had been little more than a curiosity for two thousand years.
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
Sparks jumping from the key to his hand showed lightning was electrical; his son William reportedly helped, and the key was borrowed from Benjamin Loxley.
Q 04A scientist attempting to replicate Franklin's experiment in St Petersburg in 1753 was killed. Who?
Georg Wilhelm Richmann
He is thought to have been struck by ball lightning; Dalibard had safely done the rod version in France a month before Franklin's kite.
Q 05Luigi Galvani discovered in 1780 that the legs of dead frogs did what when touched by an electric spark?
Twitched
His 'animal electricity' theory was challenged by Volta, but it gave us the words galvanise and galvanic and inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Q 06Volta's 1800 voltaic pile was made from alternating discs of copper and which other metal?
Zinc
It gave scientists a steady current for the first time and proved electricity could be made chemically; Napoleon was an admirer.
Q 07Besides inventing the battery, Volta is credited with discovering which gas?
Methane
He held the chair of experimental physics at Pavia for nearly forty years, and the volt is named after him.
Q 08In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted noticed, while preparing a lecture, that an electric current did what?
Deflected a compass needle
The accidental discovery linked electricity and magnetism; Ørsted was also the discoverer of aluminium and a friend of Hans Christian Andersen.
Q 09Michael Faraday invented the electric motor in which year?
1821
A former bookbinder's apprentice hired by Humphry Davy, he went on to discover electromagnetic induction, the basis of every generator.
Q 10Which everyday electrical terms did Faraday help popularise?
Anode, cathode, electrode and ion
He also discovered benzene, built an early Bunsen burner and had Einstein's admiration; the farad, the unit of capacitance, bears his name.
Q 11Ohm's law is usually written as V = IR. What does the R stand for?
Resistance
Georg Ohm published his analysis in 1827; current is directly proportional to voltage in a well-behaved conductor.
Q 12The ampere is named after a physicist from which country?
France
André-Marie Ampère is considered a father of electromagnetism alongside Ørsted; since 2019 the amp has been defined by fixing the elementary charge.
Q 13The SI unit of power, the watt, honours James Watt for his improvements to what?
The steam engine
Watt also developed the concept of horsepower; the unit was adopted by the British Association in 1889 and by the SI in 1960.
Q 21Roughly how many lightning flashes occur on Earth per second, on average?
About 44
That works out to nearly 1.4 billion flashes a year; Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela sees the most, with about 250 bolts a day.
Q 22Where on Earth does lightning occur most often, with the Catatumbo phenomenon producing about 250 bolts a day?
Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela
Most cloud-to-ground strikes are 'negative'; positive flashes make up under 5% but are more powerful.
Q 23Electric eels can deliver shocks of up to roughly how many volts?
860
Despite the name they are knifefish, not true eels; in 2019 they were split into three species, one named Electrophorus voltai after Volta.
Q 14James Clerk Maxwell definitively linked electricity, magnetism and what else in the 1860s?
Light
His equations remain the basis of all modern electromagnetic theory; Einstein kept his portrait beside Faraday's and Newton's.
Q 15By historical convention, electric current is defined as flowing in which direction?
From positive to negative
Franklin set the convention long before electrons were discovered, so 'conventional current' runs opposite to the actual electron flow.
Q 16The electron was discovered in 1897 by which physicist, working with cathode rays?
J.J. Thomson
The name 'electron' had already been proposed by George Johnstone Stoney in the 1870s and 1890s.
Q 17The electric field driving electrons through a wire propagates at close to what?
The speed of light
That is why an electrical signal reaches the far end of a cable almost instantly even though individual electrons crawl.
Q 18Among pure metals at room temperature, which alone conducts electricity better than copper?
Silver
Copper's softness partly explains its conductivity; it is used for most wiring because silver is far too expensive.
Q 19What is the name for charge transfer through rubbing, which explains static shocks from doorknobs?
The triboelectric effect
Rubbing transfers electrons between materials; a balloon rubbed on hair goes negative and clings to a wall.
Q 20The air around a lightning flash heats to roughly what temperature?
About 30,000 °C
That sudden heating creates the shock wave we hear as thunder.
Q 24Thomas Edison's first commercial power plant, Pearl Street Station, opened in 1882 in which city?
New York
It began with six 100 kW dynamos serving 400 lamps for 82 customers in Manhattan's financial district and ran the world's first underground urban network.
Q 25How many US patents did Thomas Edison register?
1,093
The 'Wizard of Menlo Park' ran what is considered the first industrial research laboratory and became deaf as a child.
Q 26Edison's team found a carbonised filament of which material could burn for over 1,200 hours?
Japanese bamboo
His November 1879 patent listed cotton, linen and wood splints; Joseph Swan's bulbs were already lighting London by 1881, and tungsten came later.
Q 27Roughly what share of the energy an incandescent bulb uses becomes visible light?
Less than 5%
The rest is heat, which is why LEDs have taken over most of the market.
Q 28In the 'war of the currents', which industrialist backed AC against Edison's direct current?
George Westinghouse
His company licensed Tesla's induction motor patents in 1888 and won the contract to light the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
Q 29The 1892 merger of Edison's company with its biggest rival created which corporation?
General Electric
Edison Electric merged with Thomson-Houston, effectively ending the war of the currents; the last DC utility in New York City was not switched off until 2007.
Q 30Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in Smiljan, a village in what is now which country?
Croatia
An ethnic Serb, he briefly worked for Edison in New York before licensing his AC patents to Westinghouse.