1913
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50 free 1913 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The year 1913 was the last full year of peace before the First World War, and it was anything but quiet. Inventions that still shape daily life went on sale, cities gained landmarks that stand today, and several of the people who would define the century were just starting out, or just being born. This quiz turns the best fun facts about 1913 into questions: the art crime that finally got solved, the puzzle page that began a craze, changes to American money and government, record-setting weather, daring flights and climbs, and the sport, books and scandals that filled the newspapers. A few stranger stories are here too, including a famous engineer who disappeared at sea and parents who found an unusual use for the mail. It suits history fans, anyone researching the year a grandparent was born, and hosts planning a themed quiz night or classroom review. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the questions work on screen or read aloud.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which painting, stolen from the Louvre in 1911, was recovered in Florence in December 1913?
Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa had been taken by Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre worker who had helped build its glass case. Police had even questioned Pablo Picasso over the theft.
Q 02Which newspaper puzzle did Liverpool-born journalist Arthur Wynne introduce in the New York World in December 1913?
Crossword
The crossword was first printed under the name word-cross. Britain waited until 1924 for a newspaper to run one, when the Sunday Express adapted a Wynne puzzle.
Q 03Which US mail service, launched on New Year's Day 1913, was used weeks later to send a baby to his grandmother?
Parcel post
Parcel post carried eight-month-old James Beagle a few miles in a rural carrier's wagon, as he was just under the 11-pound limit. It broke postal rules, yet several more children followed.
Q 04Which European capital was home at some point in 1913 to Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Freud?
Vienna
Vienna housed all five in one section of the city. Stalin stepped off a train that January with a passport in a false name, while Hitler was a rejected art student lodging in a doss-house.
Q 05Which present-day California national park recorded 134°F in July 1913, long listed as Earth's hottest air temperature?
Death Valley
Death Valley logged the reading at Greenland Ranch, now called Furnace Creek, though some modern meteorologists doubt it. The same spot had hit its coldest on record, 15°F, that January.
Q 06What did the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in February 1913, give the US Congress the power to collect?
Income tax
Income tax has been levied by Washington ever since. Until 1913, customs duties and excise taxes had been the government's main sources of revenue.
Q 07Which car's build time fell from over twelve hours to about 93 minutes after a moving assembly line started in 1913?
Ford Model T
The Ford Model T was built on a conveyor-driven line at the Highland Park plant in Michigan. The method needed less manpower as well as less time, and Ford kept cutting the car's price.
Q 08Which activist, later at the heart of the Montgomery bus boycott, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in February 1913?
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks lay in honor in the US Capitol rotunda after she died in 2005, the first woman given that tribute. Her refusal to move from her seat in 1955 had set off the boycott.
Q 09Which Underground Railroad conductor died in Auburn, New York, in March 1913 and was buried with semi-military honors?
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman had also served the Union Army as an armed scout and spy. Her raid at Combahee Ferry freed more than 700 enslaved people.
Q 10Which Russian composer's ballet The Rite of Spring caused an uproar at its Paris premiere in May 1913?
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky wrote it for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. The word riot only became attached to the first night in reviews written about a decade later.
Q 11Which New York City rail station, opened in February 1913, has more platforms than any other station in the world?
Grand Central
Grand Central has 44 platforms, all below ground, on two levels. It stands on the site of two earlier stations with similar names, the first dating to 1871.
Q 12Which US institution was created two days before Christmas 1913 in response to the financial panic of 1907?
The Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve was set up as twelve regional banks, a design meant to diminish Wall Street's influence. Its bill had passed the House in September but met stronger opposition in the Senate.
Q 13Which US president, inaugurated in March 1913, became the first since John Adams to address Congress in person?
Q 21Which Bengali poet, author of Gitanjali, became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore won on the strength of a small body of work he had translated into English himself. Two of his songs later became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
Q 22Which coast-to-coast road for automobiles, dedicated in October 1913, ran from Times Square to San Francisco?
Lincoln Highway
The Lincoln Highway was the first national memorial to the assassinated president, nine years ahead of the one in Washington, D.C. Its first recorded length was 3,389 miles.
Q 23Which US coin was redesigned in 1913 to show a Native American on one side and an American bison on the other?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson revived a custom that Thomas Jefferson had dropped in 1801 as too monarchical. For more than a century, presidents had sent a written message for a clerk to read aloud.
Q 14Which American athlete lost two Stockholm gold medals in 1913 for having played semi-professional baseball?
Jim Thorpe
Jim Thorpe's past came out that January in the Worcester Telegram, and amateur officials took it far more seriously than the public did. The medals were restored as replicas in 1983, 30 years after he died.
Q 15Which future US president was born in January 1913 on his family's lemon ranch in Yorba Linda, California?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was born into a poor Quaker family, in a house his father had built. A library and museum opened at the birthplace in 1990.
Q 16Which sprinter, born in Oakville, Alabama, in September 1913, went on to win four gold medals in Berlin in 1936?
Jesse Owens
Jesse Owens was the youngest of ten children of a sharecropper. His haul of four golds was not equaled until Carl Lewis won the same events in 1984.
Q 17Which alloy did Harry Brearley first cast in Sheffield in August 1913 while trying to stop gun barrels wearing out?
Stainless steel
Stainless steel was a later name: Brearley first called his alloy rustless steel. It made affordable cutlery possible and expanded Sheffield's traditional trade.
Q 18Which waterway's Gamboa Dike was blown up in October 1913 by a telegraph signal sent from the White House?
Panama Canal
The Panama Canal joined the Atlantic and Pacific at last when the blast flooded the Culebra Cut. The US president had sent the signal himself.
Q 19Which touring stage comedian signed a $150-a-week contract with Keystone Studios in September 1913 to start in films?
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin thought Keystone's comedies crude but liked the idea of a new life in films. He was hired to replace Fred Mace, a star who intended to leave.
Q 20Which physicist published a 1913 trilogy of papers describing how electrons are arranged around the atom's nucleus?
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr met resistance from older physicists such as Rayleigh and Lorentz, while Einstein's generation saw a breakthrough. His theory gave the first theoretical basis for the spectral lines of hydrogen.
The nickel
The nickel's bison was, by its sculptor's account, an animal named Black Diamond. A handful of that year's coins kept the old Liberty Head design: only five are known, and one sold for over $1 million in 1996.
Q 24Which North American peak was first climbed in June 1913 by a party led by Hudson Stuck and Harry Karstens?
Denali
Denali was the name Stuck himself preferred to Mount McKinley, and he used it almost exclusively in his account of the expedition. Walter Harper and Robert Tatum completed the summit team.
Q 25In which 1913 race did Eugène Christophe carry his broken bicycle over ten kilometres to a forge and mend it himself?
Tour de France
The Tour de France judges still penalised Christophe, because a seven-year-old boy had pumped the bellows for him. The hours lost in the Pyrenees cost him a race he had been well placed to win.
Q 26In which sport did 20-year-old amateur Francis Ouimet beat British stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray at the 1913 US Open?
Golf
Golf was widely seen in America as a pastime for the wealthy until Ouimet, a former caddie, won an 18-hole playoff in the rain. His own caddie, Eddie Lowery, was ten years old.
Q 27Which planned capital city was officially given its name by Lady Denman at a hilltop ceremony in March 1913?
Canberra
Canberra was announced as the name on Kurrajong Hill, now Capital Hill and the site of Australia's Parliament House. Lady Denman was the wife of the governor-general.
Q 28Which sporting symbol did Pierre de Coubertin create in 1913 to represent the inhabited continents of the world?
The Olympic rings
The Olympic rings were unveiled in the August 1913 issue of the magazine Olympique. The five interlocking circles are blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white field.
Q 29Which Alsatian doctor and organist left Europe in 1913 to found a hospital at Lambaréné in present-day Gabon?
Albert Schweitzer
Albert Schweitzer took along a piano fitted with organ pedals, built for the tropics and delivered by river in a huge dug-out canoe. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1952.
Q 30In which Dutch city did the Peace Palace, paid for by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, open in August 1913?
The Hague
The Hague received the palace as a courthouse for the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a body created in 1899 to end war. Within a year of the opening, Europe was fighting the First World War.