Radio Trivia
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This radio trivia quiz has 148 free questions with answers and runs the whole history of the medium: Maxwell and Hertz proving the waves existed, Marconi and Fessenden putting them to work, the first stations, the Golden Age of network drama and comedy, wartime propaganda, the transistor pocket radio, pirate ships, Top 40, payola, talk radio and satellite subscription services. It is built for pub-quiz regulars, broadcasting students, ham operators and anyone who grew up with a dial glued to one station. Questions range from easy (what AM stands for) to genuinely hard (which battery Sony's 1957 pocket radio popularised). Every answer was checked against a primary source or an encyclopaedia entry before publication, and each question shows its citation, so you can settle arguments as well as start them.
30 of 148 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ferdinand Braun, who shared the 1909 physics Nobel with Marconi, built the first example of which device in 1897?
The cathode-ray tube
The cathode-ray tube: Braun built it as a laboratory instrument for tracing electrical waves on a glowing screen, and it became the picture tube of television sets for most of the 20th century.
Q 02Where did Marconi report hearing the letter S sent across the Atlantic from Cornwall on 12 December 1901?
Signal Hill, Newfoundland
Signal Hill, Newfoundland: on 12 December 1901 Marconi reported hearing three clicks, the Morse letter S, sent from Poldhu in Cornwall; nothing recorded it, so historians have long debated what he heard.
Q 03After a gale carried off his balloon in 1901, what held up the aerial for Marconi's transatlantic radio test?
A kite
A kite: it trailed 500 feet of wire above the hilltop, and the first one sent up that morning was torn away by the same gale before a second held long enough to listen.
Q 04Marconi's mother Annie was the granddaughter of the founder of which famous drinks company?
Jameson whiskey
Jameson whiskey: Annie Jameson was a granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of the Dublin distillery; her family's connections helped Marconi find backers abroad when Italy showed little interest.
Q 05Marconi was born in 1874 in which Italian city?
Bologna
Bologna: Marconi built his first wireless sets at his family's estate outside the city and was soon sending signals to a receiver about a mile away, before he left Italy to find backers.
Q 06How did radio stations around the world mark Marconi's funeral in July 1937?
With two minutes of silence
With two minutes of silence: the day after he died in Rome, wireless operators and broadcasters across the world shut down their transmitters together at the hour set for the service.
Q 07Marconi was offered free passage on the Titanic but sailed three days earlier on which liner instead?
Lusitania
Lusitania: Marconi had paperwork to finish and preferred that ship's public stenographer, his daughter Degna recalled, so he sailed three days before Titanic left Southampton in April 1912.
Q 08In his reported Christmas Eve 1906 radio broadcast, Reginald Fessenden played a solo on which instrument?
Violin
Violin: by Fessenden's own account the programme from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, also carried a Handel record and verses from Luke's Gospel, and operators as far off as Norfolk, Virginia, heard it.
Q 09The SI unit of frequency, used to tune every radio dial, is named after which physicist?
Heinrich Hertz
Heinrich Hertz produced electromagnetic waves in his Karlsruhe laboratory in the late 1880s and measured their speed; he died at 36 in 1894, the year Marconi began the experiments that put them to work.
Q 10Whose 1864 paper predicted electromagnetic waves and argued that light itself was one?
James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell read 'A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field' to the Royal Society in December 1864; he died in 1879, years before any experiment produced the waves he had predicted.
Q 11In 1943 the US Supreme Court struck down Marconi's key tuning patent, citing earlier work by Lodge, Stone and which famous inventor?
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla: the ruling came a few months after his death, in a case the Marconi company had brought against the US government for using its patents during the First World War.
Q 12What name did Lee de Forest give the three-element vacuum tube he developed around 1906-1908?
Audion
Audion: de Forest added a wire grid to John Ambrose Fleming's two-element valve, and once he cascaded several tubes in 1912 the faint signals of radio and telephone lines could be amplified enormously.
Q 13What was the inaugural program of Pittsburgh station KDKA in November 1920?
Q 21Who was appointed the first general manager of the British Broadcasting Company in December 1922?
John Reith
John Reith, a Scottish engineer with no broadcasting experience, got the job by answering a newspaper advertisement, then spent years fending off politicians who wanted to steer the new service.
Q 22The BBC became a public corporation on 1 January 1927 under which kind of legal instrument?
A royal charter
A royal charter: it comes from the Crown, not from Parliament, and runs for a fixed term, so the BBC's future has to be renegotiated with the government each time a charter runs out.
Q 23During the 1926 General Strike, supporters of the strikers nicknamed the BBC what?
Presidential election returns
Presidential election returns: KDKA picked election night for its debut, so its few listeners learned that Harding had beaten Cox before any newspaper could print the result.
Q 14Engineer Frank Conrad's experimental station 8XK inspired which company to launch KDKA?
Westinghouse
Westinghouse: vice-president Harry P. Davis saw Conrad's weekly broadcasts drawing regular listeners and reckoned that a company station would sell the receivers Westinghouse could build.
Q 15Which liner raced to rescue Titanic's survivors after its wireless operator caught the distress call?
Carpathia
Carpathia: operator Harold Cottam was minutes from bed when he heard the call, while the much nearer Californian missed it because her only wireless operator had shut down for the night.
Q 16Which distress call were Marconi's ship operators instructed to use from 1904, before SOS took hold?
CQD
CQD: a Marconi circular of January 1904 ordered it for any ship in distress, and Jack Binns's CQD from the sinking liner Republic in 1909 brought the first major sea rescue made possible by radio.
Q 17Which country was the first to adopt the SOS distress signal, in 1905?
Germany
Germany required the signal on its own ships from 1 April 1905, and the international radio conference that met in Berlin the next year adopted the German distress sign for every seafaring nation.
Q 18Which Morse code pattern is the SOS distress signal?
Three dots, three dashes, three dots
SOS is sent as three dots, three dashes, three dots, run together as one continuous signal; it was chosen in 1905 for being unmistakable, not as an abbreviation of any phrase.
Q 19The Radio Act of 1912, passed after the Titanic disaster, confined which group to wavelengths of 200 metres and below?
Amateur operators
Amateur operators were pushed onto short waves then thought nearly useless for distance; a decade later the same wavelengths turned out to carry signals across oceans.
Q 20WEAF's first sponsored program in August 1922, often called the first radio commercial, promoted what?
Apartments in Queens
Apartments in Queens: the Queensboro Corporation paid for about ten minutes on WEAF on 28 August 1922 to pitch its Hawthorne Court apartments in Jackson Heights, closer to an infomercial than a jingle.
British Falsehood Company
British Falsehood Company: newspapers had got BBC news banned before 7 pm, but the strike stopped the presses, the ban was waived, and radio abruptly became the country's main supplier of news.
Q 24The 1988 Christmas Radio Times sold roughly how many copies, a British magazine record?
11 million
11 million: Guinness certified it as the best-selling issue of any British magazine, from the years when Radio Times alone could print the BBC's listings for the week ahead.
Q 25Which opera star sang two arias in Marconi's pioneering broadcast from Chelmsford on 15 June 1920?
Nellie Melba
Nellie Melba's concert was paid for by the Daily Mail and thrilled wireless listeners, yet before the year was out the Post Office had shut the Chelmsford broadcasts down.
Q 26Which song by the Buggles was the first thing MTV played when it launched in August 1981?
Video Killed the Radio Star
Video Killed the Radio Star had topped the charts in 16 countries with its lament for the voices of the wireless age, which made it a pointed opening choice for a television music channel.
Q 27Armstrong developed wide-band FM in a basement laboratory at which university?
Columbia
Columbia: Armstrong had studied there under Michael Pupin, later inherited his professorship, and paid for the FM research himself in the basement of Philosophy Hall.
Q 28In 1948 Armstrong sued which corporation and its network NBC for infringing his FM patents?
RCA
RCA: the suit dragged on for years and consumed most of Armstrong's wealth; after his death in 1954 his widow Marion pressed on with the cases and won a string of settlements.
Q 29In which country was Armstrong serving in WWI when he developed the superheterodyne?
France
France: Armstrong was a Signal Corps officer at a Paris laboratory when he devised the superheterodyne, the circuit that went on to sit inside almost every radio and television receiver.
Q 30What does the 'AM' in AM radio stand for?
Amplitude modulation
Amplitude modulation varies the strength of the carrier wave in step with the sound, which is why a thunderstorm, which also jolts a signal's strength, comes through an AM set as crackle.