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50 free 20th Century trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The 20th century started with horse-drawn carts and ended with a network linking the planet. In between came two world wars, the splitting of the atom, a dog in orbit, a man on the Moon and a border that opened in one confused evening. These are the turning points worth knowing. The fifty questions run decade by decade: the first flights and the first talkies, the wars and the peace treaties, the Cold War summits and the space race, the inventions that crept into every home and the sporting moments that are still argued over. Each answer comes with the detail that makes it stick. It suits a pub quiz round, a history classroom or anyone who wants to check how much of the last century they really remember.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which White Star liner sank on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in April 1912?
Titanic
Titanic carried lifeboats for only about half the people aboard, and that was fully legal under the safety rules of the day.
Q 02Which Dayton bicycle-shop brothers made the first powered, controlled airplane flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903?
Orville and Wilbur Wright
Orville and Wilbur Wright made a first flight of just 12 seconds and 120 feet, shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747.
Q 03Whose assassination in Sarajevo in June 1914 set off the crisis that became the First World War?
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
Archduke Franz Ferdinand's driver was never told of a route change, turned at the Latin Bridge and stopped right in front of Gavrilo Princip.
Q 04Which drug did Alexander Fleming discover in 1928 when a mould killed the bacteria on a culture plate by chance?
Penicillin
Penicillin was not mass-produced until the Second World War, after Florey and Heatley carried the mould to the United States in 1941.
Q 05Which barrier, built in 1961 to stop East Germans fleeing west, was opened on the night of 9 November 1989?
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall opened after spokesman Günter Schabowski, reading a note he had not been briefed on, told reporters the new travel rules took effect 'immediately'.
Q 06Which American sprinter won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics staged by Nazi Germany?
Jesse Owens
Jesse Owens's four golds in the same four events went unmatched until Carl Lewis repeated the feat at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
Q 07Which metal sphere launched by the USSR in October 1957 became the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth?
Sputnik 1
Sputnik 1 beeped for about three weeks until its batteries died, then burned up re-entering the atmosphere in January 1958.
Q 08Which 1918 pandemic got its name because a neutral country's uncensored newspapers reported it freely?
Spanish flu
Spanish flu did not start in Spain; wartime censors elsewhere buried the outbreak while Spain's press covered it, making the country look like the epicentre.
Q 09Which 1969 music festival was held on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York?
Woodstock
Woodstock never took place in the town of Woodstock; Yasgur's farm in Bethel lay 60 miles to the southwest.
Q 10Which host nation beat West Germany 4–2 after extra time in the 1966 World Cup final?
England
England lifted a trophy that had been stolen four months earlier and found wrapped in newspaper by a dog named Pickles.
Q 11Which cosmonaut made the first human spaceflight, a single orbit of Earth aboard Vostok 1 in April 1961?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin ejected and parachuted down separately from his capsule, which the USSR denied until 1971 because record rules required landing inside the craft.
Q 12Which Apollo 11 astronaut stayed in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon in July 1969?
Michael Collins
Michael Collins spent 48 minutes of every orbit out of radio contact behind the Moon, yet reported feeling 'almost exultation' rather than loneliness.
Q 13Which Moscow stray became the first animal to orbit Earth in November 1957, with no plan to bring her home?
Laika
Q 21Which Japanese city was hit by 'Little Boy', the first atomic bomb used in war, on 6 August 1945?
Hiroshima
Hiroshima's bomb was a uranium gun-type weapon, while 'Fat Man', dropped on Nagasaki three days later, used plutonium instead.
Q 22Which British prime minister flew home from meeting Hitler in September 1938 and promised 'peace for our time'?
Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain refused a suggestion to say 'peace for our time' from a Downing Street window, then said it anyway, echoing Disraeli.
Q 23Which Bolshevik leader returned from Swiss exile in April 1917 and seized power in Petrograd that October?
Vladimir Lenin
Laika died of overheating within hours, on the fourth orbit, a fact the Soviet authorities did not make public until 2002.
Q 14Which space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds after lift-off in January 1986 with teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard?
Challenger
Challenger was lost because record-low cold had stiffened the rubber O-rings in a booster joint, letting hot gas burn through to the fuel tank.
Q 15Who delivered the 'I Have a Dream' speech at the March on Washington in August 1963?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. left his script for the 'dream' passage after Mahalia Jackson shouted 'Tell 'em about the dream, Martin!' from behind him.
Q 16Which Alabama city's buses were boycotted for over a year after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in 1955?
Montgomery
The Montgomery boycott ran from December 1955 to December 1956, with Black residents organising carpools and taxi drivers charging the ten-cent bus fare.
Q 17Which city hosted the 1986 Reagan–Gorbachev summit that collapsed at the last minute over missile-defence tests?
Reykjavik
Reykjavik came unexpectedly close to a deal eliminating all nuclear weapons within a decade, and the progress made there led to the 1987 INF Treaty.
Q 18Which Iranian prime minister was overthrown in an August 1953 coup organised by MI6 and the CIA?
Mohammad Mosaddegh
Mohammad Mosaddegh's overthrow was not officially admitted by the CIA until documents released in 2013, six decades after the coup.
Q 19Which British lawyer drew the 1947 partition line between India and Pakistan in just five weeks?
Cyril Radcliffe
Cyril Radcliffe had never been east of Paris before he was handed the job, and knew no one in India when he arrived on 8 July 1947.
Q 20At which Winter Olympics venue did the United States beat the Soviet Union 4–3 in the 1980 'Miracle on Ice'?
Lake Placid
Lake Placid's upset was not the final: the United States still had to beat Finland 4–2 two days later to secure the gold medal.
Vladimir Lenin crossed wartime Germany by train with the German government's consent; the famous 'sealed train' was a cover story, and passengers even spent a night in Frankfurt.
Q 24Which 1919 treaty made Germany accept responsibility for the First World War and pay reparations?
Versailles
Germany's debt under the Treaty of Versailles was not settled until 3 October 2010, when a final instalment of $94 million was paid.
Q 25Which waterway did Egypt's Nasser nationalise in July 1956, prompting an invasion by Britain, France and Israel?
Suez Canal
The Suez Canal invasion collapsed when the United States put financial pressure on Britain, whose reserves had lost $45 million in four days.
Q 26Which June 1942 battle cost Japan four aircraft carriers after US codebreakers learned its target in advance?
Midway
Midway's codebreakers confirmed the target by having the base radio a fake report of a broken water purifier, then reading that 'AF' was short on water.
Q 27Which French resort's 1924 'International Winter Sports Week' was later declared the first Winter Olympics?
Chamonix
Chamonix was only recognised as the first Winter Olympics in 1925, and its final individual medal was not presented until 1974.
Q 28Which Pennsylvania nuclear plant's Unit 2 reactor suffered a partial meltdown on 28 March 1979?
Three Mile Island
Three Mile Island's accident came just twelve days after The China Syndrome, a film about a reactor meltdown, opened in cinemas.
Q 29Which 1971 chip, designed for a Busicom calculator, became the first commercial microprocessor for general use?
Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 was born when Busicom asked for seven chips for a calculator in 1969, and the finished 4-bit processor packed just 2,300 transistors.
Q 30Which Scottish inventor first publicly demonstrated true television images in his London laboratory in January 1926?
John Logie Baird
John Logie Baird's first televised face belonged to a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed 'Stooky Bill', scanned at five pictures per second.