Fire Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This fire trivia quiz has 147 free questions with answers and covers the science first: what combustion actually is, the fire triangle and tetrahedron, why a well-fed flame burns blue, what a flame does in zero gravity, and how Lavoisier killed off phlogiston. Then it turns to history: the earliest evidence of controlled fire and deliberate fire-making, Prometheus and the Vestals, the Great Fires of Rome, London, Meireki, Chicago and Peshtigo, and the coal seam that has burned under Centralia since 1962. The tools of fire get their turn too: John Walker's friction match, the safety match and phossy jaw, the Zippo, the first extinguisher, hydrants and pumps, smoke detectors, and the Olympic flame's 1936 relay. Easy questions suit school science and family quizzes; the harder dates and names will test firefighters and history buffs. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 147 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Chemically speaking, fire is the rapid what of a fuel?
Oxidation
Oxidation gives off heat faster than it can escape, so each burning layer of fuel lights the next and a fire feeds itself; rusting is the same kind of reaction, run far too slowly to flare.
Q 02What are the three elements of the fire triangle?
Heat, fuel and oxygen
Heat, fuel and oxygen are the triangle's three sides: take any one away and the fire goes out, which is why smothering a fire to cut off its air puts it out.
Q 03What shape does a flame take in the microgravity of space?
Spherical
Spherical flames form in microgravity because nothing makes hot gas rise: with no buoyant convection to draw the flame up into a teardrop, it spreads evenly in every direction.
Q 04When a hydrocarbon flame gets enough air, what colour does it turn?
Blue
With enough air the flame turns blue, as on a Bunsen burner with its air hole open: complete combustion leaves no glowing soot, which is what makes a candle flame yellow.
Q 05Which chemist showed that burning is combination with a gas in the air, and named that gas oxygen?
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier showed that burning is combination with oxygen, a name he coined, and so ended the old belief that burning things give off a substance of their own.
Q 06Which Hindu god of fire receives the offerings poured into the Vedic sacrificial flame?
Agni
Agni is the Vedic god of fire and the messenger who carries offerings to the other gods; the Rigveda's very first hymn is addressed to him.
Q 07At a 400,000-year-old site in England, early humans seem to have made fire by striking flint against which mineral?
Pyrite
Pyrite is so rare around the Barnham site that its two fragments were probably carried there on purpose; they lay beside burnt soil and fire-cracked handaxes.
Q 08In Greek myth, how did Zeus punish Prometheus for giving fire to humans?
An eagle ate his liver daily
An eagle ate his liver daily, and each night it grew back; in Hesiod's telling Zeus punished mankind as well, sending Pandora with her jar of evils.
Q 09Which Roman goddess's sacred flame was tended by six virgin priestesses?
Vesta
Vesta's flame was thought to keep Rome safe, so it was never allowed to die; a Vestal who let it go out was punished with a beating.
Q 10Which religion holds fire so sacred that its places of worship are known as fire temples?
Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism keeps a consecrated fire burning in each temple; the flame at Yazd in Iran is said to have burned since about AD 470, carried from shrine to shrine over the centuries.
Q 11The Great Fire of London began in 1666 on which street?
Pudding Lane
Pudding Lane held Thomas Farriner's bakery, where the fire began after midnight on 2 September; a strong east wind then drove the flames across the city for days.
Q 12How many deaths from the Great Fire of London are traditionally recorded?
Six
Six is the traditional count, though some historians suspect many poor victims left no record; the fire still destroyed some 13,000 houses and more than 80 parish churches.
Q 13After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, a gift of 8,000 books from Britain founded which institution?
The Chicago Public Library
Q 21Which English chemist invented the first commercially successful friction match around 1826?
John Walker
John Walker refused to patent his 'friction lights', saying the public should have them, so London makers copied them freely and he gave up making matches by 1830.
Q 22The key innovation of the safety match was putting which substance on a separate striking surface?
Red phosphorus
Red phosphorus sits on the box, not the head, so a safety match lights only when the two meet; the head no longer needed the poisonous white form.
Q 23Zippo lighters have been made since 1933 in Bradford, an old oil-boom town in which state?
Pennsylvania
The Chicago Public Library grew from the 'English Book Donation', sent in sympathy after a fire that killed about 300 people; it opened on New Year's Day 1873.
Q 14What stands today on the spot where the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 began?
The city's fire academy
The city's fire academy opened in 1961 on the spot where the blaze began. In 1871 a bungled alarm cost the first crews vital minutes, and a force of about 200 firefighters with 17 horse-drawn engines never caught up.
Q 15The Peshtigo Fire, America's deadliest wildfire, was centred on which state on the same day as the Chicago fire?
Wisconsin
Wisconsin's Peshtigo fire killed more than a thousand people, several times Chicago's toll, yet it stayed in the shadow of the city that burned the same night.
Q 16The 1657 Great Fire of Meireki destroyed most of which Japanese city?
Edo, now Tokyo
Edo, now Tokyo, lost perhaps 100,000 people to the fire and the blizzard that followed; legend blames a priest who was burning a cursed kimono when the wind caught the flames.
Q 17A gigantic fire whirl killed tens of thousands of refugees in Tokyo after which 1923 disaster?
The Great Kantō earthquake
The Great Kantō earthquake struck near noon on 1 September 1923; the fires it started merged into a whirl that swept the open depot grounds where tens of thousands had fled for safety.
Q 18A coal-seam fire has burned beneath which anthracite-country town since at least May 1962?
Centralia
Centralia was emptied by its fire: most residents were relocated in the 1980s, the state condemned the town in 1992, and the 2020 census found five people left.
Q 19What starts the great majority of wildland fires in the United States?
Human activity
Human activity started nearly 85 percent of them in federal data for 2000 to 2017, through unattended campfires, burning debris, equipment sparks and dropped cigarettes.
Q 20Black Saturday, Australia's deadliest bushfire disaster, struck which state in February 2009?
Victoria
Victoria lost 173 people and more than 2,000 houses on 7 February 2009; the royal commission that followed reshaped how the state prepares for and fights bushfires.
Pennsylvania's Bradford has made Zippos since George Blaisdell produced the first one in early 1933; he is said to have picked the name because he liked the sound of 'zipper'.
Q 24At which German university, newly fitted with coal-gas lines, was the Bunsen burner designed in the 1850s?
Heidelberg
Heidelberg gave Bunsen a new gas-fed laboratory, and he wanted a hot flame with no soot or glow; with it he and Gustav Kirchhoff discovered two elements, caesium and rubidium.
Q 25Which glow, seen on ships' masts in thunderstorms, is really electrical plasma and no fire at all?
St. Elmo's fire
St. Elmo's fire is an electrical discharge: a storm's electric field makes the air around pointed things such as masts and church spires glow, often with a hiss or crackle.
Q 26Frederick Graff, credited with inventing the pillar fire hydrant around 1801, went on to run which city's water works?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia's Frederick Graff is believed to have patented his hydrant, but nobody can check: the early patent records burned in the Patent Office fire of 1836.
Q 27Which famously rich Roman bought burning buildings, and the houses next door, from their frightened owners at knock-down prices?
Crassus
Crassus kept some 500 slave builders ready, Plutarch says, and bought houses that were on fire along with their neighbours for a trifle, until much of Rome was his.
Q 28An early automatic electric fire alarm was patented in 1890 by Francis Upton, an associate of which inventor?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison's mathematician Francis Upton patented the 'Portable Electric Fire Alarm' with Fernando Dibble; its battery-powered bell rang when a room grew too hot.
Q 29Ionisation smoke detectors typically use which radioactive isotope?
Americium-241
Americium-241 gives off alpha particles that ionise the air between two charged plates so a small current flows; smoke drifting in breaks the flow and trips the alarm.
Q 30The Olympic torch relay was introduced at which Games?
Berlin 1936
Berlin 1936 staged the first torch relay, carried from Olympia a kilometre at a time; the Nazi regime used the Games' imagery to link its Germany with ancient Greece.