50s and 60s Trivia
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98 free 50s and 60s trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Two decades that began with 4.4 million American TV sets and ended with a man on the Moon. In between: a polio vaccine, the first credit card, rock and roll, the Montgomery bus boycott, Sputnik, the day the music died, the pill, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Beatlemania, the March on Washington, the miniskirt, the first heart transplant, Woodstock and ARPANET. These 98 questions cover both decades evenly, history and pop culture alike, and are pitched so that people who lived through them and people who only know the reruns can both play. Easy questions ask who sparked the bus boycott and who was first in space; hard ones ask where the MOSFET was invented and who founded Liquid Paper. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a reminiscence session or a themed party.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Soviet satellite, launched in October 1957, started the Space Race?
Sputnik 1
Sputnik 1: the first US attempt to answer it, a Vanguard rocket in December 1957, rose only a few feet, fell back and exploded, and the press dubbed it Flopnik.
Q 02Which war lasted from June 1950 until an armistice in July 1953?
Korean War
Korean War: armistice talks dragged on for two years, largely because many captured Chinese and North Korean soldiers refused to be sent home.
Q 03Whose nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 triggered an invasion by Britain, France and Israel?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser: the invaders hoped to topple him, but pressure from the US and the Soviet Union forced them to withdraw, and he stayed in power.
Q 04Who overthrew Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1959?
Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro: Batista's government jailed him after a failed 1953 attack on an army barracks, then freed him in an amnesty two years later.
Q 05The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56 was sparked by the arrest of which activist?
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks: she was fired from her job as a department store seamstress after her arrest, and she received death threats.
Q 06Which disease saw a turning point in the 1950s with a successful vaccine?
Polio
Polio: soon after Jonas Salk's vaccine was licensed in 1955, faulty batches from Cutter Laboratories that still contained live virus caused thousands of infections.
Q 07Which pair announced the double-helix structure of DNA in the early 1950s?
Crick and Watson
Crick and Watson: they shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins, but Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images were key evidence, had died in 1958.
Q 08What was the first multipurpose charge card, launched in New York in 1950?
Diners Club
Diners Club: company lore says Frank McNamara came up with the idea after he forgot his wallet when the bill arrived at a New York restaurant.
Q 09Which company that had invented the transistor went on to create the MOSFET in 1959?
Bell Labs
Bell Labs: the device seemed slow and met no pressing need of the telephone system, so Bell did not pursue it at first.
Q 10Which product did Dallas secretary Bette Nesmith Graham invent?
Liquid Paper
Liquid Paper: she began by painting over her typing errors with tempera paint, and she sold the company to Gillette for nearly $48 million.
Q 11What name was given to the first immortal human cell line, cultured in 1951?
HeLa
HeLa: doctors took the cells from cancer patient Henrietta Lacks without her consent, and decades later her family sued companies that had profited from them.
Q 12Which singer died in the 1959 plane crash that became known as 'the Day the Music Died'?
Buddy Holly
Buddy Holly: tired of broken-down tour buses in freezing weather, he chartered the small plane to reach the tour's next concert in Minnesota.
Q 13Which comic strip, launched in 1950, did one cartoonist write and draw alone for nearly 50 years?
Peanuts
Peanuts: Schulz hated the title, which his syndicate imposed after another cartoonist objected to the strip's original name, Li'l Folks.
Q 21In September 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to do what?
Crash into the Moon
Crash into the Moon: eight months earlier Luna 1 had been meant to do the same, but it missed by about 6,000 km and ended up orbiting the Sun.
Q 22Which synthetic fibre was introduced in 1959?
Spandex
Spandex: DuPont set out to make a better fibre for women's girdles, which were then made of rubber.
Q 23Who became the first human in space on 12 April 1961?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin: rather than landing inside his capsule, he ejected about 7 km above the ground and came down separately by parachute.
Q 14Which 1959 epic won a record 11 Academy Awards?
Ben-Hur
Ben-Hur: at about $15 million it was then the most expensive film ever made, a make-or-break gamble for MGM, and its success saved the studio.
Q 15Audrey Hepburn won her Best Actress Oscar for which 1953 film?
Roman Holiday
Roman Holiday: its story Oscar went to Ian McLellan Hunter, a front for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, who was only given the award after his death.
Q 16Which 1955 film opened with Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock', helping send the song to No. 1?
Blackboard Jungle
Blackboard Jungle: the US ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, had it pulled from competition in Venice, fearing it would harm America's image abroad.
Q 17Which company first sold frozen meals under the name TV Dinner in the 1950s?
Swanson
Swanson: a former executive claimed the idea came from a huge surplus of unsold Thanksgiving turkeys, but members of the Swanson family disputed his story.
Q 18Which 1950s sitcom topped the US TV ratings in four of its six seasons?
I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy: to film the show instead of airing it live, Ball and Arnaz took a pay cut, and in return they won ownership of the episodes.
Q 19Which president inaugurated transcontinental US television service in 1951?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman: his speech crossed the country on a new chain of microwave relay towers, most of which were later abandoned as fibre-optic lines replaced them.
Q 20Where were the 1956 Summer Olympics held?
Melbourne
Melbourne: Australia's strict animal health rules meant the Games' horse-riding events had to be held on the other side of the world, in Stockholm.
Q 24Who became the first woman in space in June 1963?
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova: the women's cosmonaut group was later disbanded, and no other woman flew in space until Svetlana Savitskaya, 19 years later.
Q 25Who stayed in orbit as Command Module Pilot while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?
Michael Collins
Michael Collins: each time Columbia passed behind the Moon, he was cut off from all radio contact with Earth.
Q 26Which 1962 book by Rachel Carson warned of the harm done by pesticides such as DDT?
Silent Spring
Silent Spring: it stirred widespread public alarm over pesticides, and in 1972 the new Environmental Protection Agency ordered an end to most uses of DDT.
Q 27Which volunteer programme did President Kennedy establish in 1961?
Peace Corps
Peace Corps: Kennedy first challenged students to serve abroad in a late-night campaign speech at the University of Michigan.
Q 28In October 1962, what word did President Kennedy use instead of 'blockade' for the US naval action around Cuba?
Quarantine
Quarantine: a blockade was legally treated as an act of war, and the softer word also helped win the backing of the Organization of American States.
Q 29Which Berlin landmark saw a US-Soviet tank standoff in 1961?
Checkpoint Charlie
Checkpoint Charlie: the standoff began after East German police stopped a senior US diplomat driving to the theatre in East Berlin and demanded his papers.
Q 30Martin Luther King Jr. gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech at which 1963 event?
March on Washington
March on Washington: the famous 'I have a dream' passage was not in King's prepared text; he left his script and drew on lines he had used in earlier speeches.