150 Fun Facts About Classic

What is the largest planet in our solar system?

Jupiter is the largest planet yet has the shortest day: it spins once in under 10 hours, fast enough to bulge at its equator and pull its clouds into the stripes seen through a telescope.

Which country gifted the Statue of Liberty to the United States?

France's people gave it; Bartholdi designed the statue, Gustave Eiffel built its iron framework, and it crossed the Atlantic in crates to be assembled in 1886.

What is the chemical symbol for gold?

The chemical symbol for gold is Au, derived from the Latin word "aurum" meaning gold. Silver's symbol Ag comes from the Latin "argentum."

The Titanic was bound for which city when it sank on its maiden voyage in 1912?

New York never saw the Titanic arrive: the Cunard liner Carpathia pulled about 700 survivors from the lifeboats and landed them there three days after the sinking.

What is the smallest country in the world by land area?

Vatican City, smaller than many city parks, has been a state only since 1929, when a treaty with Mussolini's Italy ended nearly six decades in which the popes called themselves prisoners in the Vatican.

Who painted the Mona Lisa?

Leonardo da Vinci never handed the portrait to the family who ordered it: he took it with him when he moved to France, where King Francis I acquired it, which is why it hangs in the Louvre.

What is the capital city of Australia?

Canberra was purpose-built as the capital to settle the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, the two cities many people assume hold the title.

Which element has the atomic number 1?

Hydrogen has a single proton, which is what atomic number 1 means; its name means 'water-former', because burning it in air produces water.

Who wrote the play Romeo and Juliet?

William Shakespeare took the plot from Arthur Brooke's 1562 poem but crammed its nine months of events into a few frantic days, so that the lovers meet, marry and die within a week.

Wimbledon's tennis championships are hosted by a club that was founded for which other lawn game?

Croquet: the All England Croquet Club took up lawn tennis in 1875 as interest in croquet waned, and its first tennis championship, in 1877, drew just 22 players; croquet is still in the club's name.

What is the hardest natural substance on Earth?

Diamond resists scratching better than any other natural material, yet hard is not the same as tough: the crystal splits cleanly along certain planes, so a sharp hammer blow can shatter it.

Which planet is orbited by two small moons called Phobos and Deimos?

Mars has two potato-shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos, which may be captured asteroids; the planet's red colour comes from rust in the dust that covers its surface.

What is the longest river in Africa?

The Nile is Africa's longest river, flowing north from the Great Lakes region to the Mediterranean, yet the Congo, the continent's second longest, carries far more water to the sea.

Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?

Neil Armstrong had to take over the controls in the final minutes, when he saw the computer steering the lander toward a crater strewn with boulders, and flew on until he found level ground.

What is the most spoken native language in the world?

Mandarin Chinese has close to a billion native speakers, more than any other language; English ranks only third by that count and becomes the world's most spoken once second-language speakers are added.

Which artist is famous for cutting off his own ear?

Vincent van Gogh took a razor to his left ear in Arles on 23 December 1888 after a quarrel with Paul Gauguin, and within weeks had painted himself with the bandage still on.

Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in any ocean, lies in which trench?

Mariana Trench: its Challenger Deep, nearly 11 km down, is named after HMS Challenger, the British survey ship whose crew first sounded those depths in 1875.

In Greek mythology, who is the king of the gods?

Zeus took the throne by force, leading the revolt that overthrew his father Cronus and the Titans; he then shared out the world with his brothers, Poseidon taking the sea and Hades the underworld.

Which fruit is also known as the 'alligator pear'?

Avocado: 'alligator pear' is a garbling of the Spanish aguacate, probably helped along by the fruit's pebbly skin; mashed, it is the base of guacamole, a Nahuatl word meaning 'avocado sauce'.

How many strings does a standard guitar have?

6 strings, tuned E-A-D-G-B-E from low to high. The low E was the last to arrive: baroque guitars had five pairs of strings, and the sixth was added in the late 1700s.

Which US president, sworn in only months earlier, led the country when World War II ended in 1945?

Harry S. Truman had been vice president for only 82 days when Roosevelt died in April 1945, and it was only then that he was told the atomic bomb existed.

Which mammal is known to have the longest lifespan?

The bowhead whale may live more than 200 years: old harpoon points found embedded in whales caught generations later gave the first clue, and newer dating methods point the same way.

What does DNA stand for?

Deoxyribonucleic acid: 'nucleic' because Friedrich Miescher first found the substance in the nuclei of cells in 1869, working with pus from used hospital bandages, and 'deoxyribo' after its sugar, deoxyribose.

Which country had won the most FIFA World Cup titles as of the 2022 tournament?

Brazil kept the original Jules Rimet Trophy for good after its third title in 1970, only for the cup to be stolen in 1983 and never recovered; wins in 1994 and 2002 took the count to five.

What is the currency of Japan?

Yen means 'round', after the shape of a coin: the word shares its root with the yuan next door, and Korea's won comes from the same character.

Who developed the theory of general relativity?

Albert Einstein published the theory in 1915 and became world-famous four years later, when astronomers led by Arthur Eddington watched a solar eclipse and found starlight bending around the Sun just as he had predicted.

In which Shakespeare play do the fairy king and queen Oberon and Titania quarrel?

A Midsummer Night's Dream, written around 1595–1596: Oberon and Titania's quarrel over a changeling boy sets off the magical mischief in the woods outside Athens.

What is the tallest mountain in the world?

Mount Everest's summit stands 8,848.86 m (29,032 ft) above sea level by the 2020 joint Nepal–China survey; measured from its underwater base, Hawaii's Mauna Kea is taller.

Which famous scientist formulated the three laws of motion?

Isaac Newton set them out in his Principia of 1687, a book that might never have appeared without Edmond Halley, who urged him to publish and paid for the printing himself.

Japanese miso soup is made by dissolving fermented soybean paste into which stock?

Dashi is where umami was discovered: in 1908 the Tokyo chemist Kikunae Ikeda traced the savoury taste of its kelp broth to glutamate and named the sensation umami.

What is the Fibonacci sequence's next number after 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8?

The next number is 13, since each term is the sum of the two before it (5 + 8); the pattern was described in Indian prosody centuries before Fibonacci and appears in sunflower seed spirals and pine cones.

How many bones are in a typical adult human skeleton?

206 bones is what is left after years of fusing: a newborn has dozens more, somewhere between 270 and 300, and many of them knit together as the child grows.

Which element is represented by the symbol Fe on the periodic table?

Iron's symbol comes from the Latin ferrum; the metal is the most common element on Earth by mass, thanks to the planet's core.

Who spent 1508 to 1512 painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling?

Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor, not a painter, and took the job reluctantly, even suggesting that his young rival Raphael should do it instead; Pope Julius II insisted.

In which city would you find the Colosseum?

Rome's Colosseum stands where the emperor Nero had a private lake: Vespasian drained it and gave the ground back to the public as an arena, which his son Titus opened in AD 80.

How fast does light travel through a vacuum?

Light travels about 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum, exactly 299,792,458 metres per second, because since 1983 the metre has been defined from the speed of light rather than the other way round.

Which band released the album "Abbey Road" in 1969?

The Beatles shot the cover in about ten minutes: a policeman held up the traffic while the photographer stood on a stepladder in the road and took six frames of them on the zebra crossing outside the studio.

What is the largest hot desert in the world?

Counting cold deserts, the Sahara is only third: the polar deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic are both bigger, since a desert is defined by low precipitation rather than heat.

Which famous document begins with "We the People"?

The U.S. Constitution's preamble, 'We the People of the United States…', was largely drafted by Gouverneur Morris of the Committee of Style in the closing days of the 1787 Philadelphia convention.

What type of animal is a Komodo dragon?

Lizard: the Komodo dragon is the largest lizard alive, and females can breed without a mate: a dragon at Chester Zoo in England laid eggs in 2006 that no male had fertilised, and young hatched from them.

Which is the only continent with no native ants?

Antarctica has no native ants, yet on the other continents they are so abundant that a 2022 estimate put their number near 20 quadrillion, outweighing all wild birds and mammals combined.

Which novel by George Orwell depicts a dystopian society under constant surveillance?

1984 gave English 'Big Brother', 'doublethink' and 'thoughtcrime'; Orwell wrote it on the remote Scottish island of Jura while gravely ill with tuberculosis, and died seven months after it came out.

On which temperature scale does water boil at 212 degrees at sea level?

Fahrenheit: on Daniel Fahrenheit's scale water boils exactly 180 degrees above its freezing point; by his own account he fixed his zero with a freezing brine of ice, water and salt.

The Great Barrier Reef lies off the coast of which Australian state?

Queensland: James Cook found the reef off its coast the hard way in 1770, when the Endeavour struck it and had to be beached for almost seven weeks of repairs, at a river now named after the ship.

What gas do plants absorb from the atmosphere during photosynthesis?

Carbon dioxide supplies the carbon that plants build into sugar; the oxygen they give off comes from the water they split, not from the carbon dioxide, as isotope-tracer experiments showed.

Which ancient civilization built Machu Picchu?

Machu Picchu was built by the Inca civilization in the 15th century, located high in the Andes Mountains of Peru at about 7,970 feet above sea level. It was likely built as an estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti.

What instrument has 88 keys?

Piano keyboards grew over time: the first spanned about four octaves, those of the late 1700s about five, and makers kept adding notes until 88 keys, 52 white and 36 black, became the norm.

Which sport did the gym teacher James Naismith invent in 1891 as an indoor game for the winter?

Basketball: Naismith nailed up peach baskets with their bottoms intact, so the ball had to be fished out after every score until the bottoms were cut open; volleyball followed four years later at another Massachusetts YMCA.

What is the traditional collective noun for a group of crows?

A murder of crows is one of the fanciful 'terms of venery' drawn up for hunters in the 15th century; most of them dropped out of real use within a hundred years, and bird scientists simply say a flock.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was built to serve as what?

A bell tower for the cathedral beside it: it began to lean in the 1170s, while still being built, because the soft ground gave way on one side, and engineers eased it back by about 44 cm in work finished in 2001.

What is the name of the smallest bone in the human body?

The stapes takes its name from the Latin for stirrup, which it resembles; it is the innermost of the three tiny bones of the middle ear and passes the eardrum's vibrations on to the inner ear.

Which blood type is often called the universal donor for red cell transfusions?

O negative red cells lack the A, B and Rh D antigens, so they can usually be given to patients of any blood type in an emergency.

What is the capital city of Canada?

Ottawa was chosen as capital of the Province of Canada by Queen Victoria in 1857, a compromise among rivals Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City and Kingston, and became capital of the new Dominion in 1867.

Which country is the largest in the world by area?

Russia stretches across eleven time zones, yet at its eastern tip it lies only about 4 km from the United States: Russia's Big Diomede island faces Alaska's Little Diomede across the Bering Strait.

Who painted the melting-clocks masterpiece The Persistence of Memory?

Salvador Dalí said the soft watches came to him while he was contemplating a Camembert cheese melting in the sun, and not, as admirers liked to think, from modern physics.

Who wrote the novel Pride and Prejudice?

Jane Austen never saw her name on it: Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1813 as the work of 'the Author of Sense and Sensibility', and all of her novels came out anonymously in her lifetime.

Which element has the chemical symbol Na?

Sodium's symbol Na comes from natrium, its Neo-Latin name, coined from natron, the soda mineral that ancient Egyptians dug from dry lake beds and used to dry out mummies.

Which organ produces the hormone insulin?

The pancreas makes insulin in clusters of cells called islets, the 'islands' behind the hormone's Latin name; in January 1922 an extract first treated a dying teenage diabetic, Leonard Thompson, in Toronto.

Mount Olympus, mythical home of the gods, is the highest peak of which country?

Greece: for all its fame, the summit of Mount Olympus, Mytikas at 2,917 m, was not reached until 1913, when two Swiss climbers followed Christos Kakkalos, a local hunter of wild goats, to the top.

What is the largest animal known to have ever existed?

The blue whale, about 30 metres long and the largest animal known to have lived, feeds almost entirely on krill, tiny shrimp-like animals that the biggest whales swallow by the tonne every day.

What is the fastest land animal?

The cheetah can reach about 100 km/h (60 mph), but only for a few hundred metres; North America's pronghorn is slower flat out yet can hold its speed far longer.

Cai Lun improved papermaking around 105 CE while serving the court of which country?

Cai Lun was a eunuch official at the Eastern Han court of China; he added tree bark, hemp waste, old rags and fishnets to the pulp, which made large-scale manufacture possible.

Which inventor's telephone patent was granted on March 7, 1876?

Alexander Graham Bell's lawyer filed on the very day a rival, Elisha Gray, lodged his own telephone design; three days after the patent came through, Bell made the first call: 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.'

What is the longest bone in the human body?

The femur, or thigh bone, is about a quarter of a person's height, a ratio steady enough that anthropologists and forensic teams can estimate how tall someone stood from a single thigh bone.

Which country became the world's most populous in 2023?

India passed China during 2023 by United Nations estimates; China's own population had begun to shrink the year before, its first fall since 1961.

Painter Frida Kahlo's work is emblematic of which country's national traditions?

Mexico: Kahlo began to paint at 18 while bedridden after a bus crash, using a special easel her parents had made and a mirror placed overhead so that she could see herself to paint.

Which composer wrote the sonata known as the "Moonlight"?

Beethoven never called it that: the nickname caught on in the 1830s, after his death, from the poet Ludwig Rellstab's image of the first movement as moonlight on a lake.

Vinegar is a diluted solution of which compound?

Acetic acid is what makes wine turn: bacteria convert the alcohol into it, which is how vinegar got its name, from the Old French for 'sour wine'.

Which city hosted the first modern Olympic Games in 1896?

Athens staged the first modern Games in April 1896, where winners received a silver medal and an olive branch; gold for first place did not arrive until 1904.

Which river flows through the centre of Paris?

The Seine matters so much to Paris that the city owns the spot where the river rises: it bought the springs, in the hills near Dijon, in 1864 and still keeps them as a park.

To which ancient poet is the epic The Odyssey traditionally attributed?

Homer, also credited with the Iliad, left English two everyday words through this poem: 'odyssey' for a long, eventful journey, and 'mentor', after the friend who counsels Odysseus's son.

Which planet has the hottest surface in the solar system?

Venus's thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere traps heat, holding its surface at about 465 °C, hot enough to melt lead, under more than 90 times Earth's air pressure; that makes it hotter even than Mercury, which lies closer to the Sun.

Which metal is liquid at room temperature?

Mercury stays liquid down to about −39 °C, the only metal that is liquid at ordinary room temperature; gallium comes close, melting at about 30 °C, so a lump of it turns to liquid in a warm hand.

Who discovered penicillin in 1928?

Alexander Fleming noticed that a Penicillium mould contaminating a culture plate at St Mary's Hospital, London, had killed the surrounding Staphylococcus colonies; he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for it.

Which of these does human skin produce when exposed to UVB sunlight?

Vitamin D forms when UVB light strikes a cholesterol compound in the skin; children starved of sunlight in smoggy industrial cities developed rickets, which is why milk has been fortified with it since the early 1930s.

The Eiffel Tower opened in 1889 to mark the hundredth anniversary of which event?

The French Revolution: the tower was the centrepiece of the world's fair held for its centenary, and was due to come down after 20 years until it proved its worth as a radio mast.

Who wrote Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615?

Miguel de Cervantes playfully claims within the novel that the story was translated from an Arabic manuscript by a Moorish historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli.

What is the largest island in the world?

Greenland counts as the largest island because Australia is classed as a continent; ice covers about four-fifths of it, and the sagas say Erik the Red chose the inviting name to draw settlers.

Which is the smallest and shallowest of the world's oceans?

Arctic: it is small and enclosed enough that some oceanographers do not count it as an ocean at all, classing it instead as a mediterranean sea of the Atlantic.

What is the capital city of Turkey?

Ankara replaced Istanbul as capital in October 1923, at the birth of the Turkish republic; under its old name, Angora, it gave its name to long-haired breeds of goat, cat and rabbit.

Which artist created The Scream in 1893?

Edvard Munch said the image came to him on a sunset walk above the fjord at Kristiania, now Oslo, when the sky turned blood red and he sensed a scream passing through nature.

What do the five interlocking rings on the Olympic flag stand for?

The five continents, as the Olympic Charter puts it, though no ring stands for any one of them: Pierre de Coubertin, who drew the design in 1913, meant the five parts of the world won over to the Games.

Which mythical creature is the heraldic national animal of Scotland?

The unicorn was believed to be the natural enemy of the lion, the beast of England's kings, which made it a pointed choice; on Scotland's royal arms the unicorns appear crowned and in chains.

Which sea animal has three hearts and blue blood?

Octopus: two of its hearts push blood through the gills and the third sends it round the body, and the blood is blue because it carries oxygen with a copper-based protein instead of haemoglobin.

Which gas makes up about 78 percent of dry air?

Nitrogen fills 78 percent of the air, yet most living things cannot use it in that form: it has to be 'fixed' first, mostly by bacteria and a little by lightning.

Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?

Marie Curie was nearly left off the 1903 Physics prize: the committee meant to honour only her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel until Pierre, tipped off, insisted she be included; in 1911 she won the Chemistry prize alone.

The imperial city of Marrakesh is in which country?

Morocco was once known to outsiders as the Kingdom of Marrakesh, after the city that was so often its capital, and Persian and Urdu still call the whole country Marrakesh.

Who wrote the 1818 Gothic novel Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley began it at 18, after Lord Byron proposed, during a rain-soaked summer near Geneva in 1816, that each of his guests write a ghost story; it came out anonymously two years later.

The Stanley Cup is awarded in which sport?

Lord Stanley of Preston donated the cup in 1892 for Canada's top amateur ice hockey club; since 1926 it has gone exclusively to the NHL champion.

What makes up almost the entire diet of the giant panda?

Bamboo feeds an animal built to eat meat: the giant panda still has a carnivore's gut and digests little of what it swallows, so it has to eat enormous amounts every day.

Which US president stood at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and urged Mikhail Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall'?

Ronald Reagan kept the line in against the advice of his own officials, who thought it too provocative and cut it from draft after draft; the Wall opened two years later, on 9 November 1989.

Which element has the chemical symbol K?

Potassium's symbol K comes from its Neo-Latin name kalium, itself from kali, an Arabic-rooted word for plant ashes; Humphry Davy first isolated the metal in 1807.

How many permanent teeth does an adult human usually have?

32 teeth replace a child's 20; the last four, the wisdom teeth, arrive in the late teens or twenties, often into a jaw with no room left for them, which is why so many are taken out.

Which modern country was historically known as Persia?

Iran is what its own people had long called the country; the rest of the world said Persia until 1935, when Reza Shah asked foreign governments to use the native name.

Which planet is the only one less dense than water, so that it would float in a big enough bathtub?

Saturn, a gas giant, is about 30 percent less dense than water even though it has 95 times Earth's mass; its bright rings are mostly water ice and typically only about 10 metres thick.

Which lake's shores are the lowest land-based elevation on Earth?

The Dead Sea's surface lies more than 400 metres below sea level, the lowest land on Earth, and its water is nearly ten times as salty as the ocean, so swimmers float.

Whose final opera, The Magic Flute, premiered in Vienna in 1791?

Mozart's librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, ran the theatre and sang the bird-catcher Papageno himself on the first night, 30 September 1791; the composer died just over two months later, aged 35.

Which planned city replaced Rio de Janeiro as a national capital in 1960?

Brasília rose in the central highlands between 1956 and 1960 to pull people and power inland from the coast, and Lúcio Costa's street plan is often likened to an aeroplane or a bird.

Which sport is considered the national sport of Japan?

Sumo began as a performance for the Shinto gods, which is why wrestlers still throw salt to purify the ring before a bout.

Which lake is the deepest in the world?

Lake Baikal fills a rift where the Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart, which is why it is more than 1,600 m deep and holds about a fifth of the fresh water on the planet's surface.

Which video game giant began in Kyoto as a maker of handmade hanafuda playing cards?

Nintendo sold playing cards for decades before it tried toys in the 1960s and then arcade machines, the detour that eventually produced Mario.

Which board game is derived from The Landlord's Game, created by Lizzie Magie in 1903?

Monopoly reached shops in 1935 after Charles Darrow sold his version to Parker Brothers, turning Magie's lesson on the dangers of land rents into a game that rewards collecting them.

In L. Frank Baum's original Oz novel, what colour are the magic shoes MGM later turned ruby red?

Silver was swapped for ruby red in the 1939 film to take advantage of the new Technicolor process, then a showpiece of big-budget Hollywood productions.

Which actor refused his Best Actor Oscar for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather?

Marlon Brando stayed away from the ceremony and sent Sacheen Littlefeather to decline the statuette in protest at the film industry's treatment of American Indians.

Which puzzle game by Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov was bundled with the Game Boy in North America?

Tetris won its place in the box when Henk Rogers argued that Mario appealed mainly to young boys, while falling blocks would appeal to everyone.

Full-size mechanical props nicknamed Bruce were built for the filming of which 1970s blockbuster?

Jaws owes its suspense to Bruce: the prop sharks malfunctioned so often that Steven Spielberg mostly suggested the monster with an ominous, minimalist musical theme instead.

Which country is home to the Lego Group, whose name comes from a local phrase meaning 'play well'?

Denmark is where carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen began making wooden toys in Billund in 1932, years before his firm produced its first interlocking plastic bricks in 1949.

Which Alabama-born author won the Pulitzer Prize for her debut novel To Kill a Mockingbird?

Harper Lee published no other novel for 55 years, until Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft of the same story, appeared in 2015.

In which 1981 arcade game did Mario make his debut as a carpenter called Jumpman?

Donkey Kong's hero was renamed Mario in America after Mario Segale, landlord of the publisher's US office; the name Jumpman had been chosen to echo hit brands like Walkman.

Which pen name did Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson use for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?

Lewis Carroll is a word game on his real names: he turned Charles Lutwidge into the Latin Carolus Ludovicus, swapped the order, and translated it back into English.

Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde are the coloured ghosts that chase the hero of which arcade game?

Pac-Man was titled Puck Man in Japan; the name was changed for North America because executives feared vandals would alter the P on the cabinets.

In The Legend of Zelda games, what is the name of the sword-wielding hero the player controls?

Link is the recurring hero, while Princess Zelda, who gives the series its title, was named after the American novelist Zelda Fitzgerald.

Which 1972 Atari arcade game did Allan Alcorn build as a training exercise for Nolan Bushnell?

Pong so surprised Atari's founders with its quality that they decided to manufacture it, and it became the first commercially successful video game.

Which company created Sonic the Hedgehog after an in-house contest to design a rival to Mario?

Sega picked a hedgehog drawn by Naoto Ohshima and darkened his colour so that he would match the company logo.

Which 1942 film stars Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, an American who runs a wartime nightclub?

Casablanca was adapted from Everybody Comes to Rick's, a stage play that had never been produced, and proved a surprise winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Which 1950s sitcom starred Desi Arnaz and his real-life wife as a married couple, the Ricardos?

I Love Lucy was the first scripted television programme to be filmed on 35 mm film in front of a studio audience, with several cameras rolling at once.

Which F. Scott Fitzgerald novel is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Long Island millionaire's neighbour?

The Great Gatsby was a commercial disappointment in 1925; it surged in popularity only when free copies were handed to American soldiers during World War II.

In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, what is the name of the ship commanded by the vengeful Captain Ahab?

The Pequod goes down with everyone but the narrator, which baffled some British reviewers: their edition lacked the epilogue explaining how Ishmael survived.

Which soft drink was invented in Atlanta by John Pemberton and first sold as a patent medicine?

Coca-Cola was first marketed as a temperance drink; Pemberton sold the rights in 1888 to Asa Griggs Candler, whose marketing turned it into a global giant.

Which director of Psycho and Vertigo made cameo appearances in most of his own films?

Alfred Hitchcock never won the Academy Award for Best Director despite repeated nominations, even though Rebecca, his first American film, took Best Picture.

Which 1978 arcade game by Tomohiro Nishikado ushered in the golden age of arcade video games?

Space Invaders replaced the usual arcade timer with the aliens themselves: the closer the descending rows came, the less time the player had left.

Which 1992 fighting game's gory finishing moves helped bring about the ESRB ratings board?

Mortal Kombat showed its Fatalities in realistic digitised graphics, and the outcry over it, Night Trap and Lethal Enforcers led to age ratings printed on game boxes.

Which educational computer game began in 1971 as a Minnesota student teacher's classroom project?

The Oregon Trail was written by Don Rawitsch with two fellow student teachers, and its blunt notice of death by dysentery was later popularised on T-shirts.

Which publisher gave its name to the famous cheat code first used in the NES version of Gradius?

Konami programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto created the code because he found Gradius too difficult to play through during testing, so it hands the player a full set of power-ups.

Which mystery writer created the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and village sleuth Miss Marple?

Agatha Christie also wrote The Mousetrap, the whodunit that opened in London's West End in 1952 and became the world's longest-running play.

Which Irish author introduced Count Dracula in a novel told through letters and diary entries?

Bram Stoker filed the novel's American copyright incorrectly, which left the Count in the public domain there and free for film-makers to adapt.

Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March grow up in genteel poverty in Massachusetts in which classic novel?

Little Women exists because Louisa May Alcott's publisher, Thomas Niles, pressed her to write a book for girls, with her father urging her on.

Which Mattel fashion doll did Ruth Handler base on the German Bild Lilli doll she bought in Europe?

Barbie grew from Handler watching her daughter Barbara give paper dolls adult roles; her own husband and Mattel's directors were unenthusiastic about a grown-up doll.

Which actor voiced Darth Vader in the original Star Wars films while David Prowse wore the costume?

James Earl Jones dubbed the lines in post-production because George Lucas judged Prowse's strong West Country accent unsuitable for the villain.

In which country did architecture professor Ernő Rubik invent the Rubik's Cube in 1974?

Hungary first knew the puzzle as the Magic Cube, sold in Budapest toy shops from late 1977; it was renamed after its inventor in 1980, when Ideal Toy wanted a name to trademark.

A 2014 dig at an Alamogordo landfill proved Atari had buried cartridges of which film tie-in game?

E.T. was rumoured to lie there in its millions, but Atari officials later put the total at around 700,000 cartridges of various games.

Which engineer built the Brown Box, the prototype of the first commercial home video game console?

Ralph Baer began exploring games on television screens in 1966, and Magnavox licensed his wood-effect prototype as the Odyssey console, released in 1972.

Which Capcom arcade hit starring Ryu, Chun-Li and Guile popularised fighting games in the 1990s?

Street Fighter II sold more than 200,000 arcade cabinets and is credited with prolonging the life of the declining arcade business.

Which 1986 game can end by revealing that its armoured hero, Samus Aran, is a woman?

Metroid's twist began as a mid-development suggestion from one of the team, and it made the game one of the earliest to showcase a female protagonist.

Which Charles Dickens novel features Miss Havisham, still in her wedding dress long after a jilting?

Great Expectations opens in a graveyard, where the young orphan Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch.

Which Victor Hugo novel follows ex-convict Jean Valjean as Inspector Javert hunts him for years?

Les Misérables was already under way in 1846 when Victor Hugo witnessed the arrest of a bread thief while a duchess and her child watched pitilessly from their coach.

Which Dostoevsky novel follows Raskolnikov, a poor ex-student who plots to kill a pawnbroker?

Crime and Punishment was written after Dostoevsky returned from ten years of exile in Siberia, the same place his fictional killer is finally sent.

Which television Western followed Marshal Matt Dillon of Dodge City, Kansas, for 20 seasons?

Gunsmoke began as a radio drama in 1952 and went on to air 635 television episodes, a record for a scripted American primetime series that stood for decades.

Which 1927 film starring Al Jolson was the first feature-length picture with synchronised speech?

The Jazz Singer was only a part-talkie, with speech in several isolated sequences, yet its release effectively marked the end of the silent film era.

Which 1928 cartoon, the third Mickey Mouse film made, is considered the character's official debut?

Steamboat Willie jumped the queue because its two silent predecessors had failed to find a distributor, and Walt Disney believed synchronised sound was the future of film.

Which 1847 novel follows the foundling Heathcliff and two landed families on the Yorkshire moors?

Wuthering Heights was the only novel Emily Brontë ever wrote, and it first appeared under a pen name rather than her own.

Which Nathaniel Hawthorne novel follows Hester Prynne, publicly shamed for adultery in Puritan Boston?

The Scarlet Letter was one of the first mass-produced books in America, and its first mechanised printing of 2,500 copies sold out within ten days.

Which ancient playwright wrote Oedipus Rex and Antigone, two of the tragedies known as the Theban plays?

Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays, but only a handful have survived in complete form.

Which author wrote The Metamorphosis, in which salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up as a huge insect?

Franz Kafka's German calls the creature only a 'monstrous vermin', though adaptations of the novella usually picture a cockroach.

In English-language Scrabble, which two letter tiles are each worth ten points, the highest value?

Q and Z score highest because tile values follow how rarely each letter turns up in English; the game's inventor tallied letters in newspapers to set them.

Which board game did Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott create in Montreal in 1979?

Trivial Pursuit has several origin stories, most involving a game of Scrabble; its creators were a newspaper photo editor and a sports editor.

Which rock and roll pioneer died with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in a 1959 Iowa plane crash?

Buddy Holly had chartered the small plane himself, to leave after the show in Clear Lake for the tour's next date in Moorhead, Minnesota.

Which writer created and presented The Twilight Zone, the anthology series launched on CBS in 1959?

Rod Serling wrote or co-wrote 92 of the show's 156 episodes and delivered the monologues that open and close each one.

Which big-band leader received the first gold record, awarded in 1942 for Chattanooga Choo Choo?

Glenn Miller went missing in December 1944, when his wartime flight over the English Channel never reached its destination.

Which British actress won an Oscar for playing Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind?

Vivien Leigh landed the part after 1,400 unknowns had been interviewed for it, and later won another Best Actress Oscar for A Streetcar Named Desire.