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50 free Thomas Edison trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, built the world's first industrial research laboratory, gave the world the phonograph and a practical light bulb, lit lower Manhattan from Pearl Street, and lost the war of the currents to Westinghouse anyway. He also ran an iron mine into the ground, poured concrete houses, chased rubber in goldenrod and had his dying breath sealed in a test tube. This quiz covers the inventor, the businessman and the difficult man. Easy questions ask where his famous lab was, what he invented in 1877 and who took over his company. Harder ones want the invention behind his first patent, the newspaper he printed on a train as a teenager, the filament that finally lasted 1,200 hours, the voltage he chose for America, the elephant his studio filmed, the plant that gave him 12 percent latex and the president who asked the nation to switch off its lights when he died. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Thomas Edison, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Written for history and science teachers, inventors and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Inventions, Famous Physicists and Nikola Tesla.
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Q 01How many US patents did Thomas Edison register?
1,093
During his adult life that averaged one patent every 10 to 12 days, many of them for work done by his staff.
Q 02In which Ohio town was Edison born in 1847?
Milan
He was the seventh and last child of the family, who moved to Port Huron, Michigan, in 1854.
Q 03Which New Jersey laboratory earned Edison the nickname "The Wizard of" that place?
Menlo Park
It was built in 1876 with money from the sale of his quadruplex telegraph, and the township is now named Edison in his honour.
Q 04Which invention first brought Edison wide public notice in 1877?
The phonograph
It seemed so magical that the public dubbed him a wizard; his first version recorded on tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder.
Q 05Historian Paul Israel blames Edison's deafness on ear infections plus which childhood illness?
Scarlet fever
Edison told elaborate made-up stories about the cause, and later said deafness helped him concentrate.
Q 06What newspaper did the teenage Edison print and sell on trains between Port Huron and Detroit?
Grand Trunk Herald
It ran only twenty-four issues but had 500 subscribers, and he kept its first issue framed at home until he died.
Q 07Why did Edison resign from his night telegrapher job at Stratford Junction, Ontario?
He fell asleep and two trains nearly collided
He had been studying qualitative analysis and running chemical experiments on the job.
Q 08What was Edison's first patent, granted on June 1, 1869, for?
An electric vote recorder
He had made some money from a stock ticker in Boston, but lost it trying to expand to New York.
Q 09What was the quadruplex telegraph, for which Edison received $30,000 in 1874, able to do?
Send four messages at once on one wire
The money funded the Menlo Park lab and an investment in his brother's Port Huron street railway.
Q 10Which institution's chemistry course appears to have been Edison's only enrolment in higher education?
The Cooper Union
He took it to support work on a new telegraphy system with Charles Batchelor.
Q 11What did Edison invent in 1876 for the telephone, using granules whose resistance changed with sound?
The carbon microphone
He thought the worst part of Bell's telephone was Emile Berliner's transmitter, and tested 150 materials for the diaphragm.
Q 12Which famous ratio did Edison use to describe genius, resenting the "wizard" label as he aged?
One percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration
He grew to dislike titles that painted him as a genius rather than a hard worker.
Q 13What was the tasimeter, which Edison invented to study the corona during the 1878 eclipse?
Q 21Whose alternating current beat Edison's direct current in the 'war of the currents'?
George Westinghouse
Edison's DC plants could not serve customers more than about a mile from the power station.
Q 22Which anti-AC crusader did Edison join in publicly electrocuting animals to smear alternating current?
Harold P. Brown
Though he opposed capital punishment, Edison backed an electric chair powered by Westinghouse AC to damage his rival's image.
Q 23The 1892 merger of Edison General Electric with which rival created General Electric?
Thomson-Houston
J.P. Morgan decided the rival was the more valuable company and put its board in charge of the new firm.
A device for measuring infrared radiation
He wanted to measure the heat coming from the corona during totality.
Q 14Which filament material did Edison and Batchelor discover could last over 1,200 hours in a light bulb?
Carbonized bamboo
He had started with cardboard blackened with lampblack, then tried grasses and canes such as hemp and palmetto.
Q 15Edison's high-resistance filament led him to choose which voltage, still the US household standard?
110 volts
It was much higher than what his competitors were using at the time.
Q 16Which financier's firm helped Edison form the Edison Electric Light Company in New York?
J.P. Morgan & Co.
Members of the Vanderbilt family were also among the investors he met through lawyer Grosvenor Lowrey.
Q 17What did spectators nickname Edison's lab site when he lit it with electric lights in 1880?
The Village of Light
In 1883 he started a parallel construction business to build such systems for small towns.
Q 18Which British inventor merged his rival light-bulb firm with Edison's?
Joseph Swan
The joint venture avoided a court battle and sold the bulbs in Britain.
Q 19Edison's Pearl Street Station in New York, switched on September 4, 1882, supplied electricity in what form?
110 volts direct current
The lights were so steady that few noticed the switch-on; some came in the evening to ask why the system was not working.
Q 20In which city did Edison switch on the first steam-generating power station in January 1882?
London
The 93 kW demonstration came eight months before Pearl Street.
Q 24What did Edison's near-ruinous ore-milling venture try to extract from low-grade rock and sand?
Iron
His Ogdensburg plant used 480 electromagnets, seventy-ton rollers and the largest steam shovel in America.
Q 25What did Edison commission a system for casting from cement in a single mould in 1901?
A whole three-storey house
He built employee housing with the method, but the public relations campaign never generated enough demand.
Q 26What did Edison say in 1903 after fluoroscopy experiments nearly cost him his eyesight?
"Don't talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of them."
His assistant Clarence Dally, a human guinea pig for the project, died at 39 from the exposure.
Q 27Which chemistry did Edison settle on for his rechargeable battery after testing 10,000 combinations?
Nickel–iron
It arrived too late for electric cars, which were vanishing by 1910, and Henry Ford still lent him $1.1 million to keep researching.
Q 28Which future carmaker met Edison in 1896 while working for the Edison Illuminating Company?
Henry Ford
Edison encouraged his tinkering with automobiles; the two remained friends until Edison's death.
Q 29Who did much of the real work on Edison's motion picture camera, the Kinetograph?
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson
Edison focused on the electromechanical side while his assistant led the optical and film effort; they split by 1895.
Q 30What was the Kinetoscope, which Edison built in 1891?
A peep-hole film viewer for penny arcades
It was first publicly exhibited alongside the Kinetograph camera on May 20, 1891.