Fire Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
This fire trivia quiz has 149 free questions with answers and covers the science first: what combustion actually is, the fire triangle and tetrahedron, why a well-fed flame burns blue, what a flame does in zero gravity, and how Lavoisier killed off phlogiston. Then it turns to history: the earliest evidence of controlled fire and deliberate fire-making, Prometheus and the Vestals, the Great Fires of Rome, London, Meireki, Chicago and Peshtigo, and the coal seam that has burned under Centralia since 1962. The tools of fire get their turn too: John Walker's friction match, the safety match and phossy jaw, the Zippo, the first extinguisher, hydrants and pumps, smoke detectors, and the Olympic flame's 1936 relay. Easy questions suit school science and family quizzes; the harder dates and names will test firefighters and history buffs. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 149 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Chemically speaking, fire is the rapid what of a fuel?
Oxidation
Fire is rapid oxidation: fuel combines with oxygen in an exothermic reaction that releases heat and light once the fuel reaches its ignition temperature.
Q 02What are the three elements of the fire triangle?
Heat, fuel and an oxidising agent
The fire triangle is heat, fuel and an oxidising agent such as oxygen; remove any one and the fire goes out. The fire tetrahedron adds a fourth side, the chemical chain reaction.
Q 03What shape does a flame take in the microgravity of space?
Spherical
In microgravity a flame is spherical: with no buoyant convection hot gas does not rise, so the flame spreads evenly in all directions, burning bluer and slower than on Earth.
Q 04When a hydrocarbon flame gets enough air, what colour does it turn?
Blue
With enough air the flame turns blue, as on a Bunsen burner with its air hole open: complete combustion leaves no glowing soot, which is what makes a candle flame yellow.
Q 05Who proposed in 1777 that combustion involves a component of air he named oxygène?
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier coined the name oxygène in 1777 and showed that burning is combination with it, overturning Georg Stahl's phlogiston theory that had dominated chemistry since the early 1700s.
Q 06Which Hindu god of fire receives the offerings poured into the Vedic sacrificial flame?
Agni
Agni is the Vedic god of fire and the messenger who carries offerings to the other gods; the Rigveda's very first hymn is addressed to him.
Q 07At a 400,000-year-old site in England, early humans made fire by striking flint against which mineral?
Pyrite
Fire-cracked handaxes and burnt soil were found alongside the pyrite fragments.
Q 08In Greek myth, how did Zeus punish Prometheus for giving fire to humans?
An eagle ate his liver daily
The liver grew back each night; ancient Greeks thought it was the seat of the emotions.
Q 09Which Roman goddess's sacred flame was tended by six virgin priestesses?
Vesta
Vesta, goddess of the hearth, had her eternal flame kept by the Vestal Virgins, chosen before puberty and overseen by the pontifex maximus.
Q 10Which religion holds fire so sacred that its places of worship are known as fire temples?
Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism keeps a consecrated fire, atar, burning in its fire temples as a symbol of Ahura Mazda; Iran's Yazd Atash Behram has held its flame since the fifth century.
Q 11The Great Fire of London began in 1666 in a bakery on which street?
Pudding Lane
Thomas Farriner's bakery caught fire shortly after midnight on Sunday 2 September.
Q 12How many deaths from the Great Fire of London are traditionally recorded?
Six
Only six deaths were officially recorded, though historians suspect many poor and elderly victims went uncounted; the fire destroyed about 13,200 houses and 87 parish churches.
Q 13Roughly how many people did the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 kill?
300
About 300 people died in the Great Chicago Fire of 8–10 October 1871, which burned roughly 3.3 square miles of the city and left about 100,000 residents homeless.
Q 21Which English chemist invented the first commercially successful friction match around 1826?
John Walker
He worked in Stockton-on-Tees; Charles Sauria later added white phosphorus, which caused 'phossy jaw' in match workers.
Q 22The key innovation of the safety match was putting which substance on a separate striking surface?
Red phosphorus
The safety match moved red phosphorus onto the striking strip, leaving the head with potassium chlorate; Gustaf Erik Pasch patented the idea in Sweden in 1844.
Q 23Zippo lighters have been made since 1932 in Bradford, in which state?
Pennsylvania
Zippo lighters have been made in Bradford, Pennsylvania, since George Blaisdell founded the company in 1932; he chose the name because he liked the sound of the word 'zipper'.
Q 14How many firefighters did the Chicago Fire Department have to protect the whole city in 1871?
185
Chicago had just 185 firefighters and 17 horse-drawn steam pumpers in 1871, for a city of about 300,000 people, and the crews were exhausted from a large fire the night before.
Q 15The Peshtigo Fire, history's deadliest wildfire, struck which state on the same day as the Chicago fire?
Wisconsin
Between 1,500 and 2,500 died, at least five times Chicago's toll, but the telegraph lines burned first so few noticed.
Q 16The 1657 Great Fire of Meireki destroyed 60 to 70 percent of which city?
Edo, now Tokyo
Legend blames a priest cremating a cursed kimono; over 100,000 people died in the fire and the blizzard that followed.
Q 17A gigantic fire whirl killed about 38,000 people in Tokyo in the aftermath of which 1923 disaster?
The Great Kantō earthquake
The Great Kantō earthquake of 1 September 1923 spawned a fire whirl that swept a former army clothing depot where refugees had gathered, killing about 38,000 people in minutes.
Q 18A coal-seam fire has burned beneath which anthracite-country town since at least May 1962?
Centralia
Centralia, Pennsylvania, sits above a coal-seam fire burning since May 1962; the town was condemned, its ZIP code revoked, and the population fell from over 1,000 to five by 2017.
Q 19Roughly what share of wildfires in the United States are started by people rather than lightning?
About 85%
About 85 percent of US wildland fires are human-caused: campfires, debris burning, equipment sparks, discarded cigarettes and arson. Lightning starts most of the rest, though lightning fires tend to burn larger areas.
Q 20How many people died in Australia's Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009?
At least 173
More than 2,000 homes were lost in Victoria.
Q 24At which German university, newly fitted with coal-gas lines, was the Bunsen burner designed in the 1850s?
Heidelberg
Robert Bunsen designed the burner with instrument maker Peter Desaga at the University of Heidelberg in 1854–55, once the new laboratory was piped for coal gas.
Q 25The first fire extinguisher on record was patented in England in 1723 by which chemist?
Ambrose Godfrey
Ambrose Godfrey, a London chemist, patented the first recorded fire extinguisher in 1723: a cask of extinguishing liquid with a pewter chamber of gunpowder, set off by fuses to scatter the liquid.
Q 26Frederick Graff, who patented the first cast-iron fire hydrants in 1801, ran which city's water works?
Philadelphia
Frederick Graff was chief engineer of the Philadelphia Water Works when he designed the post-type cast-iron hydrant around 1801; his patent records were lost in the 1836 Patent Office fire.
Q 27Which ancient Alexandrian inventor is credited with building the first fire pump?
Ctesibius
Ctesibius of Alexandria, working around 270 BC, devised a twin-cylinder force pump that could throw a continuous jet of water; Hero of Alexandria later described the device.
Q 28The first automatic electric fire alarm was patented in 1890 by an associate of which inventor?
Thomas Edison
Francis Robbins Upton, a mathematician who worked for Thomas Edison at Menlo Park, patented the first automatic electric fire alarm in 1890; the first affordable home smoke detector followed in 1965.
Q 29Ionisation smoke detectors typically use which radioactive isotope?
Americium-241
Swiss physicist Walter Jaeger stumbled on the principle in the 1930s when his cigarette smoke upset a poison-gas sensor.
Q 30The Olympic torch relay was introduced at which Games?
Berlin 1936
The torch relay was introduced for Berlin 1936, devised by organiser Carl Diem; runners carried the flame from Olympia to Berlin. A symbolic flame had first burned on Amsterdam's Marathon Tower in 1928.