Famous Firsts Trivia
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49 free Famous Firsts trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
46 free famous firsts trivia questions with answers. Everyone remembers who did it first. This quiz collects the famous firsts of exploration, science, sport, politics and entertainment: Gagarin and Armstrong, the Wright brothers and Lindbergh, Amundsen at the South Pole and Hillary on Everest, Bannister's mile, Bertha Benz's road trip, the first satellite, the first test-tube baby, the first woman elected prime minister and the first Black actor to win an Oscar. The easy questions ask who first walked on the Moon and who broke baseball's colour line. The hard ones want the length of Gagarin's flight, the date the Wright Flyer left the ground, the schoolteacher who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel on her birthday, and how many days Bannister's record survived. Built for pub quizzes, classrooms and anyone who likes a record book. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biographies and event articles, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who was the first human to travel into space, in April 1961?
Yuri Gagarin
Yuri Gagarin called out "Poyekhali!" ("Off we go!") as the rocket lifted off from Baikonur.
Q 02How far did the first human spaceflight go?
One orbit
One orbit of the Earth was the whole trip, and the cosmonaut never landed in his capsule: he ejected about 7 km up and came down under his own parachute.
Q 03Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova spent almost three days in orbit, logging more flight time on her one mission than all the American astronauts who had flown before her put together.
Q 04Who was the first American in space?
Alan Shepard
He named his Mercury capsule Freedom 7 and later hit golf balls on the Moon during Apollo 14.
Q 05Who was the first American woman in space?
Sally Ride
Sally Ride had aimed at a professional tennis career before choosing physics at Stanford; she joined NASA in 1978 and flew on the shuttle five years later.
Q 06The first person to walk on the Moon commanded which mission?
Apollo 11
Apollo 11's computer was steering for a boulder field beside a crater, so Neil Armstrong took manual control and flew on to find clear ground with fuel running low.
Q 07What was the first artificial Earth satellite?
Sputnik 1
Sputnik 1 set off such alarm in Washington that Congress held hearings and, within a year, created NASA.
Q 08Laika, the first animal to orbit the Earth, was what kind of animal?
A dog
A dog: Laika was a stray taken from the streets of Moscow. Soviet accounts said she lived for days, but in 2002 a mission scientist revealed she had died of overheating within hours.
Q 09How did the Wright brothers decide who would make their first powered flight attempt in December 1903?
They tossed a coin
They tossed a coin and Wilbur won, but he stalled the Flyer on 14 December. After repairs the next turn was Orville's, so he made the first flight three days later.
Q 10Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight was the first solo crossing of the Atlantic between which two cities?
New York and Paris
New York and Paris were the terms of the $25,000 Orteig Prize for a nonstop flight between them. Lindbergh flew alone for 33.5 hours to claim it.
Q 11Aiming for Paris on her 1932 solo Atlantic flight, where did Amelia Earhart land instead?
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland: icy weather and mechanical trouble brought her down in a pasture near Derry after 14 hours 56 minutes. It was enough to make her the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo and nonstop.
Q 12Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot, had to train in which country?
France
France was her only route: no American flight school would admit a Black woman, so Coleman learned French in Chicago, sailed in 1920 and earned her international licence in June 1921.
Q 13Who led the first party to reach the South Pole in December 1911?
Roald Amundsen
Q 21In which country was the first practical car, a three-wheeler patented in 1886, built?
Germany
Germany: the three-wheeled Motorwagen was patented there in January 1886. Henry Ford, the usual guess, finished his first vehicle, the Quadricycle, ten years later in 1896.
Q 22In which country was Louise Brown, the first baby conceived through IVF, born in 1978?
Britain
Britain: she was born in Oldham after her parents had tried for nine years to conceive. The press called her a test-tube baby, though the egg was fertilised in a Petri dish.
Q 23Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie was nearly left out: the 1903 physics nomination named only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel until a Swedish mathematician warned Pierre, and her name was added.
Roald Amundsen let the world think he was sailing for the North Pole and told his crew the truth only at Madeira. His party reached the South Pole about five weeks ahead of Scott's.
Q 14Who accompanied Peary on the 1909 North Pole expedition and later said he got there first?
Matthew Henson
Matthew Henson was sent ahead as a scout and said his footprints were the first at the spot. The honours went to Peary, and Henson spent decades as a clerk in New York's Customs House.
Q 15News of the first ascent of Everest broke in Britain on the morning of which event?
Elizabeth II's coronation
Elizabeth II's coronation, on 2 June 1953: a Times reporter sent the news down the mountain in code so that rivals could not steal it, and it reached London just in time.
Q 16Junko Tabei was the first woman to climb Everest and the first woman to complete which challenge?
The Seven Summits
The Seven Summits, the highest peak on every continent, took Junko Tabei until 1992. On Everest in 1975 she had survived an avalanche that hit her camp and gone on to the top.
Q 17In which English city did Roger Bannister run the first sub-four-minute mile, in May 1954?
Oxford
Oxford, where Bannister had been a student, staged the race on its Iffley Road track. His 3 minutes 59.4 seconds ended a nine-year hold on the mile record by Sweden's Gunder Hägg.
Q 18Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, made his career as what?
A neurologist
A neurologist: Bannister was finishing medical school in London when he ran 3:59.4 in 1954, and he gave his working life to medicine rather than to sport.
Q 19Who was awarded the first US patent for the telephone in March 1876?
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell got the patent on 7 March 1876, before his device had carried a clear sentence. Three days later it did, when he called his assistant Watson in from the next room.
Q 20Who made the first long-distance car journey, in 1888, without telling her husband, the car's inventor?
Bertha Benz
Bertha Benz took her two teenage sons and drove to her mother's, stopping at a pharmacy to buy the cleaning solvent that the engine ran on.
Q 24In 1960 Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world's first woman prime minister, leading which present-day country?
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon: her husband, the prime minister, was assassinated in 1959, and his party persuaded her to lead it into the 1960 election.
Q 25Who was the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court?
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor joined the court in 1981, twelve years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the usual guess. Fresh from Stanford Law in 1952, she found no firm would hire a woman as an attorney; one offered her a job as a secretary.
Q 26Who was the first woman to serve in a US presidential cabinet?
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins ran the Labor Department for all twelve years of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency and helped draft the Social Security Act.
Q 27Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the US Congress in 1916, represented which state?
Montana
Montana gave its women the vote in 1914, after a campaign Rankin helped lead, so she won her seat four years before the Nineteenth Amendment. She went on to vote against entering both world wars.
Q 28Which vice president broke a record from 1832 for tie-breaking Senate votes?
Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris, the first woman in the job, passed the 31 that John Calhoun had cast by 1832 and left office on 33. Joe Biden, in eight years as vice president, never cast one.
Q 29Before the US presidency, Barack Obama was the first Black president of which institution?
The Harvard Law Review
The Harvard Law Review elected him in 1990, and the national attention brought a contract for a book on race relations. It became his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
Q 30Jackie Robinson broke MLB's colour line in 1947 playing for which team?
Brooklyn Dodgers
The Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base because Eddie Stanky held second. Stanky was traded away before the 1948 season, and Robinson took over second base.