Communication Trivia
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110 free Communication trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 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 110 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
'What hath God wrought', a Bible verse chosen by Annie Ellsworth, went from the Capitol to Baltimore's Mount Clare depot; Cooke and Wheatstone's needle telegraph had been running commercially in Britain since 1839.
Q 03Which engineer working with Morse developed the alphabet-based code that replaced his original?
Alfred Vail
Alfred Vail, Morse's assistant and financial backer, is credited with the dot-dash alphabet that replaced Morse's original numeric code, though the system bears only Morse's name.
Q 04On what date was Alexander Graham Bell awarded the first US patent for the telephone?
7 March 1876
US Patent 174,465 was issued on 7 March 1876, a few days before Bell's famous 'Mr Watson, come here' call; Meucci, Reis, Bourseul 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
Thomas Edison suggested 'Hello' in an 1877 letter about how to open a telephone call, while Bell favoured 'Ahoy'; the word spread through early exchange operators, nicknamed 'hello girls'.
Q 06In which year did Ray Tomlinson send the first email between users on different ARPANET hosts?
1971
In late 1971 Ray Tomlinson, at BBN, sent a test message between two side-by-side PDP-10 computers, picking the @ sign to separate the user's name from the machine's.
Q 07What did the very first SMS text message, sent over the Vodafone network in 1992, say?
Merry Christmas
Engineer Neil Papworth typed 'Merry Christmas' on a computer and sent it to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis's Orbitel phone at a party in Newbury on 3 December 1992; he 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
At CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Berners-Lee wanted a way to share documents across a large, constantly changing lab; CERN put the Web software in the public domain in 1993.
Q 09The Pony Express cut coast-to-coast message time to about ten days, but operated for only how long?
18 months
The Pony Express ran about 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861, closing two days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed; it 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
Issued on 1 May 1840, the Penny Black carried a profile of Queen Victoria based on a portrait made when she was 15, 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
Claude Chappe's system of pivoting arms on tower tops first linked Paris and Lille in 1794; the word 'telegraph' itself was suggested for it by the statesman Miot de Mélito.
Q 12How old was Louis Braille when he developed his tactile writing code in 1824?
Fifteen
Braille was fifteen, a pupil at the Paris institute for blind youth, when 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
Q 21Which satellite, launched in July 1962, relayed the first live transatlantic television feed?
Telstar 1
Telstar 1, built by Bell Labs and launched on 10 July 1962, also carried the first telephone calls and fax images through space, and gave its name to the Tornados' chart-topping instrumental.
Q 22The first ARPANET host-to-host connection, on 29 October 1969, linked UCLA with which institution?
Stanford Research Institute
UCLA student Charley Kline typed 'LO' to Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute at 10:30 pm before the system crashed; Telnet and FTP followed once the Network Control Program was written in 1970.
Q 23Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellphone call in 1973 while working for which company?
Motorola
Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher from the Paris institute, sailed to America with Gallaudet in 1816; the school blended French Sign Language with local sign systems such as the one used on Martha's Vineyard.
Q 14Why was SOS adopted as the international distress signal in 1906?
Simplicity of its Morse pattern
SOS stands for nothing at all; it was chosen at the 1906 Berlin convention for the simplicity of its Morse pattern, an unbroken three dots, three dashes, three dots, replacing Marconi's CQD.
Q 15The word 'emoji' comes from Japanese words meaning what?
Picture and character
Emoji means 'picture and character', from e (picture) plus moji (character); its resemblance to 'emotion' and 'emoticon' is pure coincidence, and the first 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
Scott Fahlman posted the proposal on 19 September 1982 to mark jokes; Vladimir Nabokov had mused in a 1969 interview 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
Face with Tears of Joy was the first pictograph chosen; Oxford and SwiftKey found it made up about 20 per cent of all emoji used in the UK in 2015.
Q 18In the US postal system, what does ZIP stand for?
Zone Improvement Plan
ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan; the five-digit codes arrived on 1 July 1963, promoted by the cartoon Mr ZIP, and 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
James Buchanan replied to Victoria's greeting, which had taken about 16 hours to transmit; the cable, laid by Cyrus Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company, soon failed after Wildman Whitehouse applied far too much voltage.
Motorola's Martin Cooper rang his rival Joel Engel at Bell Labs from a Manhattan sidewalk on 3 April 1973 using a DynaTAC prototype; 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 25What was Twitter's original character limit per post, in force until 2017?
140
The limit was 140 characters, chosen so a post plus username fitted inside the 160-character SMS limit; the service had launched in July 2006 as 'twttr'.
Q 26In which city, then in the Russian Empire, was Ludwik Zamenhof born?
Białystok
Zamenhof was born in Białystok in 1859, a town of Poles, Jews, Russians and Germans whose mutual incomprehension, he said, inspired his language; he published it in 1887 as Doktoro Esperanto.
Q 27The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and which third script?
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek, which scholars could already read, gave Champollion and Young their key; the stone was found in July 1799 by a French officer during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and has been displayed at the British Museum since 1802.
Q 28Cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, was developed to write which language?
Sumerian
Sumerian scribes in southern Mesopotamia pressed reed styluses into clay from about 3200 BCE; the name comes from the Latin cuneus, wedge, and the script was later adapted for Akkadian and other languages.
Q 29Cai Lun, traditionally credited with inventing paper, was a court official of which Chinese dynasty?
Eastern Han
Cai Lun, a eunuch at the Eastern Han court, reported his process to Emperor He in 105 CE; paper fragments from the 2nd century BCE exist, but his bark-and-hemp pulp made large-scale manufacture possible.
Q 30E. Remington and Sons began selling the typewriter behind the QWERTY layout in which year?
1874
The Sholes and Glidden machine went on sale in 1874 and caught on with the Remington No. 2 of 1878, which added a shift key for lower-case letters; the layout carried over to computer keyboards.