60 free Communication trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every leap in human communication left a great trivia question behind: the four words Samuel Morse tapped out in 1844, the two words in the first text message, the reason the @ sign is in every email address, and why a Danish king's nickname is on your headphones. This communication trivia quiz walks through the whole history, from cuneiform and the Rosetta Stone through printing, postage stamps, semaphore, the telegraph and telephone, radio and television, and on to the internet, mobile phones, emoji and hashtags. There are also questions on the languages and codes people built to be understood: Braille, American Sign Language, Esperanto, the NATO phonetic alphabet, SOS, Mayday and 10-4, plus a few on communication theory, from Marshall McLuhan's most famous line to the 7-38-55 rule and Claude Shannon's 1948 paper. It suits a technology round at a pub quiz, a classroom unit on media history, or a team icebreaker for anyone whose job involves talking to other people. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedic and primary sources before publishing, and each question carries a citation.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Around which year did Johannes Gutenberg invent a method for mass-producing movable type in Europe?
1440
His hand mould let metal type be cast quickly and in quantity; Korean metal movable type already existed but produced only about 40 sheets a day.
Q 02What first message did Samuel Morse telegraph from Washington to Baltimore on 24 May 1844?
What hath God wrought
It went from the Capitol to the Mount Clare depot; the first commercial needle telegraph, by Cooke and Wheatstone in Britain, was already seven years old.
Q 03Which engineer working with Morse developed the alphabet-based code that replaced his original?
Alfred Vail
The system is still named for Morse alone, though he was one of several developers.
Q 04On what date was Alexander Graham Bell awarded the first US patent for the telephone?
7 March 1876
Charles Bourseul, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis and Elisha Gray have all also been credited with inventing the device.
Q 05Which inventor is credited with popularising 'hello' (or 'hullo') as the standard telephone greeting?
Thomas Edison
Before the telephone, greetings usually named a time of day; connecting people across time zones made those awkward.
Q 06In which year did Ray Tomlinson send the first email between users on different ARPANET hosts?
1971
He picked the @ sign to separate the user's name from the machine's, and the first message was a test between two computers sitting side by side.
Q 07What did the very first SMS text message, sent over the Vodafone network on 3 December 1992, say?
Merry Christmas
Engineer Neil Papworth sent it from a computer to Richard Jarvis's phone at a party in Newbury, and later said 'it didn't feel momentous at all'.
Q 08Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?
CERN
He wanted a way to store, find and share documents across a large, constantly changing lab; the Web opened to the public in 1993.
Q 09The Pony Express cut coast-to-coast message time to about ten days, but operated for only how long?
18 months
It went bankrupt as soon as the transcontinental telegraph opened in October 1861, then was quickly romanticised into Old West legend.
Q 10The Penny Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp, was issued in the UK in which year?
1840
It carried a profile of the 21-year-old Queen Victoria and was Sir Rowland Hill's idea for showing that postage had been prepaid.
Q 11Who invented the most widely used optical telegraph, a chain of towers with pivoting arms, in France in 1792?
Claude Chappe
He coined both 'télégraphe', the origin of the English word, and in 1801 the word 'semaphore'.
Q 12How old was Louis Braille when he developed his tactile writing code in 1824?
Fifteen
He improved on Charles Barbier's 'night writing', which used 12-dot cells for 36 sounds; Braille cut the cell to six dots.
Q 13American Sign Language emerged at an 1817 Hartford school co-founded by Thomas Gallaudet and which French teacher?
Laurent Clerc
The school mixed Old French Sign Language with several indigenous sign languages, including the one used on Martha's Vineyard.
Q 21Which satellite, launched in July 1962, relayed the first live transatlantic television feed?
Telstar 1
It also carried the first telephone calls and telegraph images through space, and gave its name to a chart-topping instrumental by the Tornados.
Q 22The first ARPANET host-to-host connection, on 29 October 1969, linked UCLA with which institution?
Stanford Research Institute
UCLA student Charley Kline and SRI's Bill Duvall made the link at 10:30 pm; Telnet and FTP followed once a control program was written in 1970.
Q 23Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellphone call in 1973 while working for which company?
Motorola
Q 14When SOS was agreed as the international distress signal in 1906, what did the letters stand for?
Nothing at all
It is really an unbroken three dots, three dashes, three dots; phrases like 'save our souls' were backronyms invented later.
Q 15The word 'emoji' comes from Japanese words meaning what?
Picture and character
Its resemblance to 'emotion' and 'emoticon' is pure coincidence; the first emoji sets came from Japanese device makers in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Q 16Which computer scientist proposed the :-) and :-( smileys on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board in 1982?
Scott Fahlman
Vladimir Nabokov had mused in the 1960s that there ought to be a typographical sign for a smile, 'some sort of concave mark'.
Q 17Which emoji was chosen as Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in 2015?
Face with Tears of Joy
Oxford and SwiftKey found it was the most-used emoji in the world that year.
Q 18In the US postal system, what does ZIP stand for?
Zone Improvement Plan
The five-digit codes arrived on 1 July 1963; ZIP+4 added a hyphen and four more digits in 1983.
Q 19Which Scottish inventor patented an 'Electric Printing Telegraph', ancestor of the fax, in 1843?
Alexander Bain
Bain reproduced graphic signs in the lab by 1846; the telephone was still three decades away.
Q 20Queen Victoria's 1858 telegram, the first official one across the Atlantic cable, went to which US president?
James Buchanan
The cable, built by Cyrus Field's company, failed within a month when Wildman Whitehouse applied too much voltage trying to speed it up.
He rang his rival at Bell Labs from a Manhattan sidewalk; the phone did not reach the market until 1983.
Q 24Who first proposed using hashtags on Twitter, in a 2007 tweet?
Chris Messina
He never tried to patent the idea, saying hashtags 'were born of the internet, and owned by no one'.
Q 25Twitter's original character limit per post was raised to 280 in 2017. What was it before?
140
The service launched in July 2006 as 'twttr'; the limit fitted an SMS message with room left for a username.
Q 26In 1887 Zamenhof published his constructed language under which pseudonym, later the language's name?
Doktoro Esperanto
The name means 'one who hopes'; Zamenhof was a Jewish ophthalmologist from Białystok, then in the Russian Empire.
Q 27The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and which third script?
Ancient Greek
It was found in July 1799 by a French officer during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and has been the British Museum's most visited object since 1802.
Q 28Cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, was developed to write which language?
Sumerian
Its name comes from the Latin cuneus, wedge, for the shape of the impressions pressed into clay in southern Mesopotamia.
Q 29Cai Lun, traditionally credited with inventing paper, was a court official of which Chinese dynasty?
Eastern Han
Earlier forms of paper existed from the 3rd century BCE; his innovation was adding pulp from tree bark and hemp ends, which made large-scale manufacture possible.
Q 30E. Remington and Sons began selling the typewriter behind the QWERTY layout in which year?
1874
It caught on with the Remington No. 2 of 1878 and remains the de facto standard on computers a century and a half later.