20th Century Trivia
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98 free 20th Century trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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 98 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's Flyer was on loan to London's Science Museum from 1928 to 1948, because Orville was feuding with the Smithsonian, which had credited Langley.
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 said it was President Roosevelt, not Hitler, who snubbed him: he was never invited to the White House or even sent a telegram.
Q 07Which metal sphere launched by the USSR in October 1957 became the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth?
Sputnik 1
Sputnik 1's beeping from orbit shocked the United States into creating NASA, whose founding law Eisenhower signed the following July.
Q 08Which 1918 pandemic got its name because a neutral country's uncensored newspapers reported it freely?
Spanish flu
Spanish flu probably did not start in Spain, and in Spain itself it was known as the 'French flu'.
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: after Wallkill passed a law against it, Max Yasgur rented out his farm in Bethel just a month before.
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 kept quiet because record rules required a pilot to land inside.
Q 12Which Apollo 11 astronaut stayed in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon in July 1969?
Michael Collins
Michael Collins later ran the National Air and Space Museum and got its new building on the Mall finished in time to open for the 1976 Bicentennial.
Q 13Which Moscow stray became the first animal to orbit Earth in November 1957, with no plan to bring her home?
Laika
Q 21Which British prime minister flew home from meeting Hitler in September 1938 and promised 'peace for our time'?
Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain was echoing Disraeli's 1878 'peace with honour', yet less than a year later Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war.
Q 22Which Bolshevik leader returned from Swiss exile in April 1917 and seized power in Petrograd that October?
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin crossed wartime Germany by train with the German government's help, because Germany hoped his return would undermine Russia's war effort.
Q 23Which 1919 treaty made Germany accept responsibility for the First World War and pay reparations?
Versailles
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 15Which 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 16Which 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 17Which Iranian prime minister was overthrown in an August 1953 coup organised by MI6 and the CIA?
Mohammad Mosaddegh
Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown after nationalising Iran's British-run oil industry, and the CIA formally confirmed its role in the coup only in 2013.
Q 18Lord Mountbatten oversaw partition, but which British lawyer drew the India–Pakistan border in just five weeks?
Cyril Radcliffe
Cyril Radcliffe had never visited India before drawing the line, and once the job was done he left the country and never returned.
Q 19At 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 famous upset was not the final: the United States still had to beat Finland in its last game to secure the gold medal.
Q 20Which Japanese city was hit by 'Little Boy', the first atomic bomb used in war, on 6 August 1945?
Hiroshima
Hiroshima was hit by a uranium gun-type bomb so trusted that its design was never fully tested, while the Trinity test had tried out the plutonium type.
Resentment of the Treaty of Versailles helped power the Nazis' rise, and Germany made its last reparations-related debt payment only on 3 October 2010.
Q 24Which 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, and both superpowers demanded that the invaders withdraw.
Q 25Which 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 26Which French resort's 1924 'International Winter Sports Week' was later declared the first Winter Olympics?
Chamonix
Chamonix's last individual medal was handed out only in 1974, after a historian found a scoring error that had cost American ski jumper Anders Haugen the bronze.
Q 27Which Pennsylvania nuclear plant's Unit 2 reactor suffered a partial meltdown on 28 March 1979?
Three Mile Island
Three Mile Island's accident came the same month The China Syndrome opened, a meltdown thriller that the nuclear industry had dismissed as far-fetched.
Q 28Which 1971 chip, designed for a Busicom calculator, became the first commercial microprocessor for general use?
Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 began as a Busicom calculator chip, but when Busicom ran into financial trouble, Intel bought the rights and sold it for general computing.
Q 29Which Scottish inventor first publicly demonstrated true television images in his London laboratory in January 1926?
John Logie Baird
John Logie Baird's mechanical television lost out in the end: in 1937 the BBC dropped his system in favour of Marconi-EMI's all-electronic one.
Q 30Which car, the first mass-produced on moving assembly lines, had sold more than 15 million by 1927?
Ford Model T
The Ford Model T's moving assembly line drew partly on the conveyors that carried carcasses through Chicago's meatpacking plants.