Welding Trivia
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99 free Welding trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free welding trivia questions with answers. This welding trivia quiz is built for people who actually strike arcs, and for anyone who wants to understand what they are watching. It covers the processes (SMAW, GMAW, GTAW, submerged arc, friction stir, electron beam), the gases and metals (argon, acetylene, tungsten), and the history from Bronze Age forge welding to Benardos's carbon arc, Kjellberg's coated electrodes and the first auto-darkening helmet. There are also questions on the strange corners of the trade: welding underwater and in orbit, the Liberty ships that cracked in half, cold welding in the vacuum of space, and the 1,600-year-old iron pillar in Delhi that refuses to rust. Difficulty ranges from apprentice to old hand. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries the sentence that supports it, so you can settle shop-floor arguments with it.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Until the late 19th century, what was the only welding process for iron and steel?
Forge welding
Forge welding, heating iron and hammering the pieces together, was the blacksmith's only way to weld for millennia; gas, arc and resistance welding all appeared at the end of the 19th century.
Q 02The earliest known welding dates to which period?
The Bronze Age
The Bronze Age: goldsmiths pressed overlapping sheets of soft gold together to make small boxes, welding them with pressure and little or no heat.
Q 03Which scientist's discovery of the electric arc in the early 1800s laid the groundwork for arc welding?
Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy produced the arc with a battery in the early 1800s; Russia's Vasily Petrov made a continuous arc independently in 1802 and proposed using it to melt metals.
Q 04What kind of electrodes did Nikolay Benardos's 1881 arc welding method, the first practical one, use?
Carbon
Carbon electrodes struck the arc in the method Benardos patented with Polish engineer Stanisław Olszewski; within a decade Russia's Nikolai Slavyanov and America's Charles Coffin had replaced them with metal electrodes.
Q 05Which American inventor is credited with inventing electric resistance welding in the late 19th century?
Elihu Thomson
Elihu Thomson is credited with inventing resistance welding and patented it in the 1880s; in 1892 his Thomson-Houston company merged with Edison's to form General Electric.
Q 06Oxygen-acetylene welding was first developed in 1903 by engineers from which country?
France
France's Edmond Fouché and Charles Picard developed it in 1903, burning acetylene in pure oxygen rather than air to get a flame hot enough to melt steel.
Q 07An oxy-acetylene welding flame burns at roughly what temperature?
3,500 °C
3,500 °C is about the peak of an oxy-acetylene flame, the hottest of the commonly used fuel gases, which is why one torch can melt steel to weld it or burn through it to cut.
Q 08What is the chemical formula of acetylene?
C2H2
C2H2 is acetylene, a triple-bonded hydrocarbon; dripping water onto calcium carbide releases it, which is how carbide lamps made their own fuel.
Q 09Oscar Kjellberg and Arthur Strohmenger each introduced what innovation to arc welding in the early 1900s?
The first coated electrodes
The first coated electrodes: Kjellberg dipped iron wire in carbonates and silicates, while Strohmenger used clay and lime, and the coatings gave a steadier arc than bare wire.
Q 10What is the informal name for SMAW, the manual process that uses a flux-coated consumable electrode?
Stick welding
Stick welding: the welder hand-feeds a rod-shaped, flux-coated electrode, and the burning flux protects the weld. Its portability made it the staple process for field repair and maintenance work.
Q 11In manual metal arc welding, what two by-products come from the electrode's disintegrating flux coating?
Shielding gas and slag
Shielding gas and slag both keep atmospheric contamination out of the molten pool; the slag is chipped off afterwards.
Q 12MIG and MAG are subtypes of which process?
Gas metal arc welding
Gas metal arc welding covers both: MIG shields the arc with an inert gas, MAG with an active one. Its continuously fed wire is easy to automate, which made it the most common industrial welding process.
Q 13Gas metal arc welding was developed in 1948 by which US research organisation?
Battelle Memorial Institute
Q 21Electron-beam welding is usually performed in what environment?
In a vacuum
In a vacuum, air molecules cannot scatter the electron beam, so its energy stays focused in a spot fine enough to make deep, narrow welds.
Q 22Exothermic (thermite) welding heats metal using a reaction between a metal oxide and powdered what?
Aluminium
Aluminium powder strips the oxygen from iron oxide in a reaction that needs no outside heat or power, leaving molten iron to run into the joint; Hans Goldschmidt filed the patent in 1895.
Q 23Thermite welding is most widely used to join what?
Railway rails
Railway rails are the main job: molten steel from the thermite reaction is poured into a mould around the gap, after a torch has preheated the rail ends so the pour is not chilled.
The Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio developed gas metal arc welding in 1948. Early versions needed costly inert gas, so the process was first used mainly on aluminium and other non-ferrous metals.
Q 14Which shielding gas, introduced in 1953, made wire-fed arc welding economical on steel?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide was first used to shield wire-fed welding in 1953; far cheaper than the inert gases used until then, it made the process economical on steel and spread quickly.
Q 15TIG welding uses an electrode made of what?
Tungsten
Tungsten has the highest melting point of any metal, so the electrode carries the arc without melting away while filler rod is fed in separately by hand.
Q 16Which shielding gas did Northrop's original early-1940s TIG process use on magnesium aircraft parts?
Helium
Helium gave the process its trade name, Heliarc: Russell Meredith patented the torch at Northrop because magnesium, chosen for the XP-56 fighter, reacts with air and could not be welded conventionally.
Q 17In which 1980s film does a Pittsburgh steel-mill welder dream of becoming a professional dancer?
Flashdance
Flashdance stars Jennifer Beals as Alex Owens, who welds in a steel mill by day and dances in a bar by night while working up the nerve to audition for a ballet school.
Q 18Which noble gas is the most common inert shielding gas in welding?
Argon
Argon makes up nearly 1% of the air, so it is plentiful, and because it is heavier than air it settles over the weld and needs lower flow rates than lighter gases.
Q 19In submerged arc welding, what is the arc 'submerged' beneath?
A blanket of granular flux
A blanket of granular flux buries the arc, so there is no visible flash and almost no spatter or fume; the flux becomes conductive when molten and carries the current.
Q 20Which solid-state process was developed at Britain's TWI in 1991?
Friction stir welding
Friction stir welding: Wayne Thomas at TWI used a spinning tool to soften and stir the metal together, and with no melting it makes strong joints in light alloys for ships, trains and spacecraft.
Q 24Joining metals with a filler that melts below about 450 °C is classed as which process?
Soldering
Soldering uses fillers that melt below about 450 °C, so the parts never melt; above that line the process is brazing, whose hotter, harder fillers usually give stronger joints.
Q 25In brazing, what draws the molten filler metal into the joint?
Capillary action
Capillary action pulls the molten filler into the gap, which is why brazed parts are made to fit closely; braze welding, by contrast, builds up filler without relying on it.
Q 26Spot-welding electrodes are usually made from which low-resistance metal?
Copper
Copper-alloy electrodes conduct current well and carry off heat, so the metal melts only at the contact point between the sheets. Water cooling keeps the electrodes themselves from softening.
Q 27The modern welding helmet was first introduced in 1937 by which company?
Willson Products
Willson Products, a safety-equipment maker in Reading, Pennsylvania, introduced the modern welding helmet in 1937. Before that, welders relied on hand-held shields or simple goggles.
Q 28The first auto-darkening welding filter, Speedglas (1981), came from which country?
Sweden
Sweden: Hornell International of Gagnef launched the Speedglas LCD shutter in 1981, darkening the instant its sensors detect the arc. 3M bought the company in 2004.
Q 29The painful eye condition welders call 'arc eye' is medically known as what?
Photokeratitis
Photokeratitis is essentially sunburn of the cornea from ultraviolet light. Skiers and mountaineers get the same condition, called snow blindness, from glare off snow.
Q 30The American Welding Society grew out of a wartime committee serving which industry?
Shipbuilding
Shipbuilding: the committee served the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the body that built and ran America's merchant ships in the First World War, and in 1919 its members founded the society to keep advancing welding in peacetime.