San Jose Trivia
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45 free San Jose trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This San Jose trivia quiz covers the biggest city in the Bay Area from its founding as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe in 1777 to its 1988 motto, "Capital of Silicon Valley". It asks about the two years San Jose spent as California's first state capital, the mercury mines of Almaden, the orchards of the Valley of Heart's Delight, the world's first scheduled radio broadcasts, IBM's hard disk drive and the tech giants headquartered downtown today. There are questions on the landmarks and teams too: Sarah Winchester's ever-growing mansion, Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, San Jose State's Speed City sprinters, the Sharks and their Shark Tank, the Earthquakes and the first goal in MLS history, and the Bacharach song that made everyone ask for directions. Easy questions ask which county San Jose sits in; the hard end wants dates, mayors and record-book details. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on San Jose, its history, its institutions and its sports teams, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01San Jose is the county seat of which California county?
Santa Clara
Santa Clara County has San Jose as its seat and largest city, yet it is named for Mission Santa Clara de Asís, founded nearby earlier in the same year as the pueblo.
Q 02Which city was founded in 1781 as Spanish California's second civilian town, four years after San Jose?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles began in 1781 as the second pueblo, a farm town like San Jose, which José Joaquín Moraga had founded four years earlier with 14 settler families.
Q 03San Jose's pueblo was founded to grow food for which two Spanish presidios?
San Francisco and Monterey
San Francisco and Monterey were the presidios it fed: the first colonists, who had come overland from Mexico with the Anza expedition, were settled between the two forts as farmers.
Q 04What distinction did San Jose hold when California joined the Union in 1850?
It was the first capital
It was the first capital: the legislature met in San Jose from December 1849 until 1851, on what is now Plaza de César Chávez, before lawmakers decamped to Vallejo.
Q 05California's first two legislative sessions, held in 1850 and 1851, earned what boozy nickname?
Legislature of a Thousand Drinks
The 'Legislature of a Thousand Drinks' so disliked its makeshift quarters that after two sessions it took up Mariano Vallejo's offer of land for a new seat of government.
Q 06Which computer pioneer, born in San Jose in 1950, has a downtown street named for his nickname?
Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder known as Woz, was the biggest private donor to the campaign that built the Children's Discovery Museum, whose address is 180 Woz Way.
Q 07Which mayor adopted the motto "Capital of Silicon Valley" in 1988?
Tom McEnery
Tom McEnery, mayor from 1983 to 1991, adopted 'Capital of Silicon Valley' as the tech boom transformed the old farm town; a Chronicle columnist later likened it to Arlington, Virginia, claiming to be America's capital.
Q 08As of the 2020 census, which city ranks second in California by population, one place above San Jose?
San Diego
San Diego, with about 1.39 million residents in 2020, sits one place above San Jose, which took third from San Francisco in the 1990 census after growing eightfold since 1950.
Q 09Before San Jose, which was the only US city to fall back below one million residents?
Detroit
Detroit peaked near 1.85 million in 1950 and fell below one million by the 2000 census as auto jobs and residents left for the suburbs; San Jose followed with a 2022 estimate of 971,233.
Q 10Before the tech boom, the orchard-filled region around San Jose went by what nickname?
Valley of Heart's Delight
The 'Valley of Heart's Delight' was America's leading fruit-growing and canning region until the 1960s, famed for prunes and apricots, before suburbs and tech campuses replaced the orchards.
Q 11Which vegetable was first farmed commercially in the United States near San Jose in the 1920s?
Broccoli
Broccoli: Sicilian-born brothers Stefano and Andrea D'Arrigo raised it near San Jose from seed sent from Sicily, then shipped it to the East Coast under their Andy Boy label, trademarked in 1927.
Q 12San Jose's Almaden Valley is named for mines producing which metal, vital to gold-rush ore processing?
Mercury
Mercury came from New Almaden, named after Spain's Almadén mine and once North America's largest producer; San Jose's Mercury newspaper was named with a nod to both the metal and the messenger god.
Q 13Which company was San Jose's largest employer for years before its cannery closed in 1999?
Del Monte
Q 21Where is James Lick, the benefactor of Lick Observatory, buried?
Under the telescope
Under the telescope: Lick died in 1876, and in 1887 his body was laid beneath the future site of the great refractor, where a tablet reads 'Here lies the body of James Lick'.
Q 22Which moon of Jupiter, the first found since Galileo's time, was discovered at Lick Observatory in 1892?
Amalthea
Amalthea was spotted by eye by Edward Emerson Barnard at Lick's great refractor, the last moon ever found without photography; Charles Perrine's later Jovian finds there came from photographic plates.
Q 23What kind of institution was San Jose State University when it was founded in 1857?
A normal school for teachers
Del Monte had the best-known brand and the longest life among San Jose's canneries; when its plant shut in 1999, it ended an industry in which generations of local students had worked their summers.
Q 14Which company opened San Jose operations in 1943 and later invented the hard disk drive there?
IBM
IBM began in San Jose with a 1943 punch-card plant; at its 1952 lab Reynold Johnson's team built RAMAC, a machine weighing over a ton whose fifty 24-inch disks held about five megabytes.
Q 15What was Charles Herrold's 1909 station, regarded as the first with scheduled radio programming, called?
San Jose Calling
Herrold's station announced itself as 'San Jose Calling'; his wife Sybil played records on air from 1912, and the station evolved into KQW and finally KCBS in San Francisco.
Q 16Which of these tech companies is headquartered in San Jose?
Adobe
Adobe was founded in Mountain View in 1982 and later moved its headquarters to towers in downtown San Jose; Apple is based in Cupertino, Google in Mountain View and Meta in Menlo Park.
Q 17Sarah Winchester, who built San Jose's sprawling Mystery House, was the widow of which kind of magnate?
A firearms maker
A firearms maker: William Wirt Winchester was heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and after his death in 1881 Sarah moved to California and bought the farmhouse she spent decades enlarging.
Q 18Roughly how many rooms did Sarah Winchester's ever-growing San Jose mansion have when she died in 1922?
160
160 rooms is the usual count, along with some 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows and 47 stairways, all grown from the eight-room farmhouse she bought in 1886.
Q 19What destroyed the seven-story tower of the Winchester house?
The 1906 earthquake
The 1906 earthquake brought down the seven-story tower and wrecked the upper floors; Sarah Winchester had the rubble cleared but never rebuilt, which is why some doors now open onto nothing.
Q 20Lick Observatory, east of San Jose, sits on top of which mountain?
Mount Hamilton
Lick Observatory, completed in 1888 on the 4,200-foot summit of Mount Hamilton, was the world's first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory; San Jose adopted sodium street lamps to limit its light pollution.
San Jose State began as Minns' Evening Normal School, a normal school for teachers, in San Francisco in 1857; it moved to San Jose in 1871 and became the founding campus of the California State University system.
Q 24What nickname did San Jose State's track team earn while producing Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Lee Evans?
Speed City
'Speed City' was the 1960s nickname of coach Bud Winter's sprint programme; Smith and Carlos gave their raised-fist salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and a statue of them stands on campus.
Q 25Which two San Jose State alumni won a combined four Super Bowls as NFL head coaches?
Bill Walsh and Dick Vermeil
Bill Walsh and Dick Vermeil both played at San Jose State; Walsh won three Super Bowls with the 49ers, and Vermeil won one with the Rams after quitting coaching for 14 years, citing burnout.
Q 26What is the mascot name of San Jose State's sports teams?
Spartans
Spartans was also the football stadium's name for more than eight decades: Spartan Stadium, opened in 1933, kept it until a credit union bought the naming rights in 2016.
Q 27Where did the San Jose Sharks play home games for their first two NHL seasons, before their own arena opened?
Cow Palace
The Cow Palace in Daly City, a former livestock pavilion, hosted the Sharks from 1991 to 1993, even though the NHL had rejected the building in 1967 as a home for the Seals.
Q 28Which name finished ahead of 'Sharks' in the contest to name San Jose's NHL team?
Blades
Blades topped the mail-in contest, which drew more than 5,000 suggestions, but the owners, the Gund brothers, feared the name evoked weapons and chose the runner-up.
Q 29Which software company bought the naming rights to the Sharks' arena, the Shark Tank, in 2013?
SAP
SAP was co-founded by Hasso Plattner, who also heads the Sharks' ownership group; its 2013 deal gave the arena a fourth name, after San Jose Arena, Compaq Center and HP Pavilion.
Q 30Which team beat the Sharks in their first Stanley Cup Final appearance, in 2016?
Pittsburgh Penguins
The Pittsburgh Penguins won the 2016 final in six games; San Jose had won the Presidents' Trophy in 2008-09 without reaching a final.