Engines Trivia
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90 free Engines trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every engine is the same trick told a different way: heat something, let it push, and turn the push into motion. The people who worked that out — a clergyman, a travelling salesman, a Cornish mine engineer, a German physicist racing a British officer to the first jet — are as strange and specific as the machines they left behind. These 90 questions cover the whole family: steam pumps and record-breaking locomotives, the four-stroke and two-stroke cycles, diesels and the fuels they burn, turbojets, scramjets and the engines that lifted the Saturn V, plus the V8s, superchargers and oddballs that car people argue about. Each answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something you did not know. Play it for the bragging rights, hand it to the friend who can name an engine by its sound, or print it for a pub round that is not about football for once.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'engine' descends from which Latin word, meaning inborn talent or cleverness?
Ingenium
Ingenium, Latin for inborn talent, reached English as Old French 'engin', so an engine was at first any clever contrivance; 'ingenious' grew from the same root.
Q 02What became of Rudolf Diesel in September 1913, on his way to a business meeting in London?
Vanished from a steamship
Diesel vanished from a steamship, the Dresden, on an overnight crossing from Antwerp; ten days later a Dutch pilot boat found a body whose pockets held his pill case and pocketknife.
Q 03James Watt's horsepower, devised to compare steam engines with draft horses, equals about how many watts?
746
One horsepower is about 746 watts, yet Watt's benchmark of 33,000 foot-pounds a minute is more than most horses can keep up through a working day.
Q 04Which fuel lets a Top Fuel dragster's supercharged V8 produce more than 11,000 horsepower?
Nitromethane
Nitromethane carries oxygen in its own molecule, so a cylinder can burn about eight times as much of it as petrol with each charge of air; NHRA rules cap the blend at 90 per cent.
Q 05Which Scottish minister's 1816 engine, run by external heat, is fitted to Sweden's Gotland-class submarines?
Robert Stirling
Robert Stirling's closed-cycle engine heats and cools a sealed gas instead of burning fuel inside, which is why submarines use it: it runs exceptionally quietly.
Q 06The 14-cylinder Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C, the world's largest reciprocating engine, is designed to drive what?
Container ships
Container ships such as the Emma Mærsk carry the 14-cylinder version, which stands 13.5 metres tall, weighs over 2,300 tonnes and puts out 80 megawatts, about 107,000 horsepower.
Q 07Which streamlined LNER locomotive set the steam speed record of 126 mph in 1938, a mark that still stands?
Mallard
Mallard hit 126 mph (203 km/h) on 3 July 1938 during a trial of a new quick-acting brake, and no steam locomotive has officially beaten it since.
Q 08Which Rolls-Royce engine, one of its bird-of-prey series, powered the Spitfire, Hurricane and Lancaster?
Merlin
Merlin is a small falcon: Rolls-Royce named its piston aero engines after birds of prey, and the Merlin went on to power the Mustang too, built in America by Packard as the V-1650.
Q 09Which engine, five per Saturn V first stage, remains the most powerful single-chamber liquid-fuel engine?
F-1
The F-1 gave about 1.5 million pounds of thrust; to cure its combustion instability, engineers set off small bombs inside the firing chamber until the flame recovered in a tenth of a second.
Q 10Which fuel did the Space Shuttle's three main engines burn, fed from the external tank along with oxygen?
Liquid hydrogen
Liquid hydrogen, stored cryogenically, fed the three RS-25 engines at the orbiter's tail, each producing around 418,000 pounds of thrust at liftoff.
Q 11Which engine type is usually lubricated by oil mixed into its petrol?
Two-stroke
Two-stroke engines finish their whole cycle in one crankshaft turn and use the crankcase to pump in the fuel mixture, so the oil is blended into the petrol and burned with it.
Q 12Which part helps a diesel engine, which has no spark ignition, to start in cold weather?
Glow plug
A glow plug warms the air in the cylinder so the fuel lights from compression alone; a diesel relies solely on compression heat to ignite its charge.
Q 13At a 1900 exhibition, on the French government's suggestion, a small diesel engine was run on which fuel?
Peanut oil
Peanut oil ran the engine so smoothly that, as Diesel himself wrote, 'very few people were aware of the fact' — an early biofuel demonstration.
Q 21Which locomotive, built by Peter Cooper for the Baltimore and Ohio, lost a race to a horse-drawn car?
Tom Thumb
Tom Thumb suffered a mechanical failure mid-race and the horse won, yet Cooper had built it precisely to convince the B&O's owners that steam could do the job.
Q 22Which Union Pacific locomotives, built for freight over the Wasatch Range, alone used a 4-8-8-4 layout?
Big Boy
Big Boy No. 4014 was restored to steam in 2019 and is the only one of the eight survivors still running; just 25 were ever built.
Q 23In which country did the world's first diesel-powered locomotive run in 1912, on a line out of Winterthur?
Switzerland
Switzerland's Winterthur–Romanshorn line saw the test runs; the diesel-mechanical machine was delivered to Berlin in September 1912, was not a commercial success, and the outbreak of war in 1914 ended its trials.
Q 14Which aero-engine layout, used on the B-25's Wright Cyclones, fixes its cylinders in a star around a turning crankshaft?
Radial
Radial engines are short and air-cooled, which suited warplanes: the 14-cylinder Twin Cyclone powered the B-25 Mitchell and the Grumman Avenger.
Q 15Which lubricant did WWI rotary aero engines like the Gnome burn through in a total-loss system?
Castor oil
Castor oil kept lubricating even when mixed with the fuel, so rotaries — whose cylinders spun with the propeller — sprayed it out with the exhaust.
Q 16Which nine-cylinder air-cooled engine of 1925, the R-1340, was the very first built by Pratt & Whitney?
Wasp
The Wasp first ran on 29 December 1925 and founded a famous series; its 1,344 cubic inches gave it its number, R-1340, in the American naming style.
Q 17What nickname did the 28-cylinder, four-row Pratt & Whitney R-4360 earn from its staggered cylinder rows?
Corncob
Corncob fitted: each row of seven cylinders was offset slightly from the one before, a spiral that let cooling air reach the rear rows of a 4,360-cubic-inch monster.
Q 18RP-1, the fuel burned by the Saturn V's first stage and the Falcon 9, is a refined form of what?
Kerosene
Kerosene refined to rocket grade, RP-1, resembles the Jet A burned by airliners but is made to stricter standards, since impurities would break down and clog an engine's narrow cooling passages.
Q 19Whose experimental turbine vessel Turbinia turned up unannounced at the 1897 Spithead naval review?
Charles Parsons
Charles Parsons had invented the steam turbine in 1884 and built Turbinia in 1894; easily the fastest ship afloat, it set the pattern for the next generation of liners and warships.
Q 20Whose giant beam engine powered nearly every exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia?
Corliss
Corliss's Centennial Engine was started by President Grant and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, then drove the fair's machinery through more than a mile of shafting.
Q 24In a diesel-electric locomotive, the diesel engine only spins a generator; what actually turns the wheels?
Traction motors
Traction motors, fed by the generator, drive the axles; with no mechanical link between the diesel engine and the wheels, the locomotive needs no gearbox.
Q 25Which Napier opposed-piston diesel, two per locomotive, powered British Rail's Class 55?
Deltic
Deltic means 'in the form of the Greek letter delta', the triangle its three cylinder banks make; each 18-cylinder engine gave 1,650 bhp from 88 litres, and a Class 55 carried two.
Q 26Which company's 1932 flathead, cast as a single block, was the first V8 ordinary buyers could afford?
Ford
Ford's flathead was an automotive milestone, ranked among the company's most important developments; monobloc V8 castings existed before but had never been mass-produced.
Q 27Which GM division's small-block V8, launched for 1955, passed 100 million units built by 2011?
Chevrolet
Chevrolet's small-block began at 265 cubic inches and grew to 400; the 350-cubic-inch, 5.7-litre version became GM's corporate standard V8 across its sibling brands.
Q 28Which 1964 Chrysler V8, the 'elephant engine', takes its name from its dome-shaped combustion chambers?
426 Hemi
The 426 Hemi got its 'elephant' tag for its high power, heavy weight and sheer size; 'Hemi' is short for hemispherical, the half-sphere shape of its cylinder heads.
Q 29Which Honda engine technology of 1975 met US emissions rules without needing a catalytic converter?
CVCC
CVCC, Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion, lights a rich mixture in a small pre-chamber to burn a lean main charge; Honda licensed it to four rival carmakers, Toyota among them.
Q 30Which cycle, its expansion stroke longer than its compression, runs the petrol engine in Toyota hybrids?
Atkinson
Atkinson's design trades power for thermal efficiency, a bargain that made little sense until hybrids such as the early Prius could add an electric motor to supply the missing punch.