Phone Trivia
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219 free Phone trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Phone trivia questions with answers. Phone trivia covering the whole history of the thing in your pocket. It starts with Alexander Graham Bell's disputed patent and the words he said to Watson, moves through the undertaker who invented the automatic exchange, why old dials had letters, the world's first emergency number and the 555 numbers movies use, then jumps to cell phones: Martin Cooper's 1973 call to his rival at Bell Labs, the $3,995 DynaTAC brick, the first text message, the indestructible Nokia 3310, the Razr, the CrackBerry, the day Steve Jobs announced three products that were one, and the little green robot that now runs most of the world's phones. Easy questions any smartphone owner will get open the set; the later ones - which Deutsche Telekom engineer chose 160 characters, which Alabama town made the first 911 call, how long a DynaTAC took to charge - will test a proper gadget historian. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its citation.
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Q 01What did Alexander Graham Bell say in the first intelligible telephone call?
'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you'
'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you' was the line; Bell later refused to keep a telephone in his study, calling his invention an intrusion on his real work.
Q 02In which city was Alexander Graham Bell born in 1847?
Edinburgh
Edinburgh was Bell's birthplace in 1847; the family left for Canada in 1870 after tuberculosis had killed both of his brothers.
Q 03What happened across North American telephone networks during Bell's funeral in 1922?
Service observed a moment of silence
Service observed a moment of silence: every phone in North America was silenced as Bell was buried on the Nova Scotia estate he had made his home after falling for the place on a family holiday.
Q 04Which Italian inventor's telephone work was acknowledged by a US House resolution in 2002?
Antonio Meucci
Antonio Meucci filed a patent caveat in 1871 but let it lapse after 1874; the House resolution said that had he paid the $10 fee to keep it alive, no patent could have gone to Bell.
Q 05Which German inventor built an electric 'Telephon' in 1861, fifteen years before Bell's patent?
Johann Philipp Reis
Johann Philipp Reis called his 1861 device the 'Telephon'; it turned sound into electrical impulses, and Edison later named him the first inventor of a telephone, though 'only musical not articulating'.
Q 06Almon Strowger, who patented the automatic telephone exchange in 1891, worked in which trade?
Undertaker
Strowger was an undertaker in Kansas City who, the story goes, believed an operator was steering his callers to a rival; his 1891 patent led to the first automatic exchange at La Porte, Indiana, in 1892.
Q 07Why did old rotary dials carry letters as well as numbers?
To represent telephone exchange names
The letters were there to represent telephone exchange names such as PEnnsylvania 6-5000, dialled as 736-5000; all-number calling took over once the supply of usable names ran short.
Q 08Touch-Tone push-button dialling made its public debut at which event?
The 1962 Seattle World's Fair
The 1962 Seattle World's Fair let the public try Touch-Tone at the Bell pavilion; President Kennedy later keyed '1964' on a push-button phone to start the countdown to the 1964 World's Fair.
Q 09Which city introduced 999, the world's first emergency telephone number, on 30 June 1937?
London
London launched 999 on 30 June 1937, prompted by a 1935 Wimpole Street house fire in which callers could not reach the operator quickly enough.
Q 10The first arrest made through a 999 call, a week after its 1937 launch, was for what?
Burglary
Burglary: a week after the launch a woman dialled 999 about an intruder and police caught Thomas Duffy within five minutes, though the number had been devised to reach the fire brigade faster.
Q 11Which number is the standard emergency number on GSM mobile networks worldwide and across the EU?
112
112 is written into the GSM standard, so handsets can dial it even when locked, and networks in countries such as the US and Australia pass it on to the local emergency number.
Q 12Outside films and TV, North America's 555 exchange has traditionally been used for which real service?
Directory assistance
Directory assistance, on 555-1212, was the exchange's one traditional use, which left its other numbers free for fiction; only 555-0100 to 555-0199 are now officially reserved for that.
Q 13The coin payphone's inventor is said to have had the idea in 1888 after struggling to phone whom?
A doctor
Q 21Which predictive-text system let people type words on a numeric keypad with one press per letter?
T9
T9, short for Text on 9 keys, began in 1987 as an accessible typing system driven by eye tracking; in 1995 its inventors noticed that phone keypads grouped the alphabet the same way.
Q 22Roughly how many Nokia 3310 handsets were sold after its launch in 2000?
126 million
126 million Nokia 3310s were sold, making it one of the most successful phones ever; its tough casing later became an internet joke, with fans calling the handset indestructible.
Q 23Which game came pre-loaded on the Nokia 3310 and became an icon of early mobile gaming?
Snake II
Snake II came on the Nokia 3310 with three other games; the original Snake's creator, Taneli Armanto, had first tried to build a Tetris-style game, but rights problems pushed him to the snake idea.
A doctor: the story goes that nobody would lend William Gray a telephone when his wife fell ill, so he devised a coin-operated one, first installed at a Hartford bank in 1889.
Q 14Britain's red telephone kiosks, including the K6 of 1935, were designed by which architect?
Giles Gilbert Scott
Giles Gilbert Scott won the 1924 kiosk competition and designed the K6 for George V's 1935 Silver Jubilee; he wanted his kiosk silver with a greeny-blue interior, but the Post Office painted it red.
Q 15Which 1960s spy comedy used a phone booth as a secret entrance to headquarters?
Get Smart
Get Smart (1965–70) opened with Maxwell Smart dropping into CONTROL headquarters through the floor of a phone booth; Superman used booths for costume changes.
Q 16Roughly how much did the DynaTAC 8000X, the first handheld cell phone, cost when it went on sale?
$4,000
$4,000, near enough: the DynaTAC 8000X listed at $3,995, about seven months' pay on the US minimum wage of the day, after a decade spent turning the 1973 prototype into a product.
Q 17What nickname did the DynaTAC's bulky shape earn it?
The brick
The brick was users' name for the DynaTAC 8000X, close in size and weight to a clay house brick; the label later stuck to any bulky early handset once smaller phones arrived in the 1990s.
Q 18The world's first commercial cellular network, launched in Tokyo in 1979, served what kind of phone?
Car phones
Car phones were all it served when the first cellular network opened in Tokyo in 1979: no handheld cell phone went on sale anywhere until the 1980s.
Q 19What did the world's first SMS text message, sent on 3 December 1992, say?
'Merry Christmas'
'Merry Christmas' was typed by engineer Neil Papworth on a computer and sent over Vodafone's network to Richard Jarvis's Orbitel 901 handset on 3 December 1992.
Q 20How did German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand arrive at the 160-character SMS limit?
He typed sentences and counted
He typed sentences and counted: nearly all ran under 160 characters, and the postcards and Telex messages his committee checked were just as short, so 160 became the limit.
Q 24The Motorola Razr V3, released in 2004, holds which sales record?
Best-selling clamshell phone of all time
Best-selling clamshell phone of all time, at a widely cited 130 million units: the Razr V3 launched in 2004 as an exclusive fashion phone and took off only after its price was cut.
Q 25Which Canadian company, based in Waterloo, Ontario, launched the first BlackBerry in 1999?
Research In Motion
Research In Motion introduced the BlackBerry 850, a two-way pager, in 1999; the product came to define its maker so completely that in 2013 the company renamed itself BlackBerry.
Q 26What addiction-themed nickname for the BlackBerry was Webster's New World Word of the Year for 2006?
CrackBerry
'CrackBerry' was Webster's New World College Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2006, a nod to the phone's addictive pull; a decade later the company had stopped making its own handsets.
Q 27Which US president insisted on keeping his BlackBerry in office?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama relied on his BlackBerry through the 2008 campaign and, told that security and legal worries meant giving it up as president, fought to keep one after his inauguration.
Q 28Whom did engineer Martin Cooper phone in the first public handheld cell phone call, in 1973?
His rival at Bell Labs
His rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel, took the call: Cooper announced that he was speaking from a real handheld cellular telephone.
Q 29Where did Steve Jobs unveil the first iPhone on 9 January 2007?
Macworld
At Macworld Expo on 9 January 2007, Jobs teased three products – a widescreen iPod, a phone and an internet communicator – before revealing they were one.
Q 30What did Apple give early iPhone buyers after its 2007 price cut?
A $100 credit
A $100 credit at Apple's stores went to early buyers after 'hundreds of emails' of protest: the 8 GB iPhone had dropped from $599 to $399 two months after going on sale.