50th Birthday Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
49 free 50th Birthday trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Anyone turning 50 this year arrived in 1976, the year the United States threw itself a 200th birthday party, a 14-year-old Romanian scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics, a lander called Viking 1 sent back the first pictures from the surface of Mars, and two Steves in California started a company called Apple. Concorde began carrying passengers, JVC launched VHS, the Ramones released their first album and Rocky won Best Picture. These 49 questions are built for a party: the news of 1976 (Carter beats Ford, Mao dies, Ebola and Legionnaires' disease get their names), the sport (Steelers, Reds, Borg's first Wimbledon, Dorothy Hamill's haircut), the screens (Charlie's Angels, The Muppet Show, Laverne & Shirley, Taxi Driver), the music (Hotel California, Dancing Queen, Frampton Comes Alive!) and the class of 1976 who are also turning 50: Reese Witherspoon, Peyton Manning, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ronaldo and more. Easy questions cover the hits; harder ones ask about Cray supercomputers, the two-dollar bill and the Chowchilla kidnapping. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so the table learns something even when they miss. Play it on phones or print it for the party.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which company, founded on April Fools' Day 1976, priced its first computer at $666.66?
Apple
Apple had a third co-founder, Ronald Wayne, who got cold feet within two weeks and gave up his 10% stake for $800, leaving Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to carry on without him.
Q 02Which supersonic airliner began carrying paying passengers on 21 January 1976?
Concorde
Concorde's first fare-paying flights went from London to Bahrain and from Paris to Rio de Janeiro, because the United States had not yet agreed to let the supersonic jet land.
Q 03Which home video format did JVC introduce in 1976?
VHS
VHS tapes ran for two hours when Sony's rival Betamax managed only one, an edge that helped JVC's format win the home video war of the 1980s.
Q 04The Cray-1, first delivered by Seymour Cray's company in 1976, was a famous early what?
Supercomputer
Supercomputer: the Cray-1 was the world's fastest machine for years. Its tower was curved into a C to keep the wiring short, and the padded bench around its base hid the power supplies.
Q 05On July 20, 1976, Viking 1 became the first American spacecraft to land on which planet?
Mars
Mars was meant to be reached on July 4, the Bicentennial itself, but the chosen site looked too rough from orbit. The landing slipped to the seventh anniversary of Apollo 11's Moon landing.
Q 06NASA's first Space Shuttle, rolled out in September 1976, was renamed after a letter-writing campaign by fans of which TV show?
Star Trek
Star Trek fans flooded the White House with letters, so the shuttle that was to be called Constitution became Enterprise. The show's creator and cast turned up to watch it roll out.
Q 07Who presented the Bicentennial Bell in Philadelphia in July 1976?
Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II handed over the bell two days after the Fourth of July. It was cast at Whitechapel in London, the same foundry that had made the Liberty Bell for Philadelphia in the 1750s.
Q 08Which US banknote returned in April 1976 after ten years away, with the Declaration of Independence on its back?
The two-dollar bill
The two-dollar bill came back to save money, since one note could do the work of two dollar bills. It was issued on April 13, the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, whose portrait is on the front.
Q 09Who narrowly beat incumbent Gerald Ford in the November 1976 US presidential election?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter began the race so little known outside Georgia that the stock response to his candidacy was "Jimmy who?". The former peanut farmer won as a Washington outsider in the first election after Watergate.
Q 10In a 1976 debate, President Ford wrongly claimed there was no Soviet domination of where?
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe was firmly in the Soviet bloc at the time. Offered the chance to take it back by a panellist, Ford insisted that Poles did not feel dominated, then stood by the claim for days.
Q 11Who did Gerald Ford narrowly hold off for the 1976 Republican nomination?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan tried to tip the contest by naming a Pennsylvania senator, Richard Schweiker, as his running mate before the vote, hoping to win over wavering moderates. Ford still won on the first ballot.
Q 12Which Chinese leader died on September 9, 1976, after a series of heart attacks?
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong left a power vacuum behind him. Within weeks his successor, Hua Guofeng, had arrested Mao's widow and the rest of the Gang of Four, the radicals who had driven the Cultural Revolution.
Q 13A July 1976 earthquake that killed over 240,000 people flattened which Chinese city?
Tangshan
Q 21In July 1976, North and South were formally unified as the Socialist Republic of what?
Vietnam
Vietnam was reunified under communist rule from Hanoi, a little over a year after the fall of Saigon. A decade later the same government began letting private enterprise back in.
Q 22Which kidnapped newspaper heiress was convicted of armed bank robbery in March 1976?
Patty Hearst
Patty Hearst was filmed helping her kidnappers rob a bank two months after they seized her, and her lawyers argued she had been brainwashed. Her seven-year sentence was cut short and she walked free in 1979.
Q 23In the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping, 26 schoolchildren and an adult were buried in what?
A box truck in a quarry
Tangshan was asleep when the quake struck at 3:42 in the morning, and most of its buildings came down within minutes. The official toll of about 242,000 is widely thought to be too low.
Q 14Which British prime minister unexpectedly resigned in March 1976?
Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson stunned Westminster by quitting five days after his 60th birthday, then revealed he had settled on it two years earlier. His Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, won the contest to succeed him.
Q 15In June 1976 the UK and Iceland ended the third of which oddly named conflict?
The Cod War
The Cod War ended with Britain accepting Iceland's 200-mile fishing limit. Tiny Iceland had leverage: it could threaten to walk out of NATO, which needed the island to track Soviet submarines.
Q 16Israeli commandos freed about 100 hijacked hostages on July 4, 1976, at which African airport?
Entebbe
Entebbe, in Idi Amin's Uganda, lay some 2,500 miles from Israel. The assault leader, Yonatan Netanyahu, was the only Israeli soldier killed, and the raid was renamed Operation Yonatan in his honour.
Q 17The Soweto uprising that began on June 16, 1976, took place in which country?
South Africa
South Africa had ordered black schools to teach in Afrikaans, and thousands of Soweto pupils marched against it, setting off days of deadly clashes with police. June 16 is now a public holiday there, Youth Day.
Q 18Which deadly virus was first recorded in 1976, in Nzara, Sudan?
Ebola
Ebola takes its name from a river in what was then Zaire. It flows near the village of Yambuku, where a second outbreak was raging in the same months as the one in Sudan.
Q 19A mystery pneumonia at a 1976 Philadelphia convention was named after which organisation?
The American Legion
The American Legion's convention-goers fell ill in such numbers that the illness became Legionnaires' disease. Months later the culprit proved to be an unknown bacterium spread through the hotel's air conditioning.
Q 20Which Indian Ocean island nation, whose capital is Victoria, became independent from Britain in June 1976?
Seychelles
Seychelles' first president lasted less than a year before he was ousted in a coup in 1977. The party that took over then held the presidency until 2020.
A box truck in a quarry, buried under the earth, held them for about 16 hours. Then the bus driver and the older children stacked mattresses to reach the roof hatch, forced it open and dug their way out.
Q 24Anita Roddick opened the first branch of which cosmetics chain in Brighton in 1976?
The Body Shop
The Body Shop began as a way for Anita Roddick to support herself and her two daughters while her husband was away travelling in South America. It grew into a worldwide chain known for its campaigning.
Q 25Which gourmet candy brand was first sold in 1976 at an ice cream parlour near Los Angeles?
Jelly Belly
Jelly Belly was the idea of a sweets distributor, David Klein, who named it in tribute to the blues singer Lead Belly. Four years later he signed the trademark over to the firm that made the beans for him.
Q 26Which 14-year-old gymnast scored the first perfect 10 at the 1976 Summer Olympics?
Nadia Comaneci
Nadia Comaneci's perfect score came up as 1.00. The scoreboards had been built with only three digits, because their makers had been told that nobody could score a 10.
Q 27Which city hosted the 1976 Summer Olympics?
Montreal
Montreal's mayor had promised that the Olympics could no more lose money than a man could have a baby. The Games left the city more than a billion dollars in debt.
Q 28Which event did Bruce Jenner win at the 1976 Olympics?
The decathlon
The decathlon champion, now Caitlyn Jenner, was handed a small American flag by a fan and waved it on the lap of honour. Flag-waving victory laps were rare then, and winners have copied the gesture ever since.
Q 29Dorothy Hamill won 1976 Olympic figure-skating gold and started a craze for what?
A wedge haircut
A wedge haircut like the bob she wore on the ice became a trend among women and girls. She left skating a move as well: a camel spin dropping into a sit spin, which she invented and which is still called the Hamill camel.
Q 30Which team beat the Dallas Cowboys 21–17 in Super Bowl X in January 1976?
Pittsburgh Steelers
Pittsburgh Steelers receiver Lynn Swann caught only four passes, but they went for 161 yards, and his 64-yard catch-and-run produced the winning touchdown. He became the first wide receiver named Super Bowl MVP.