This fire trivia quiz has 159 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 159 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Chemically speaking, fire is the rapid what of a fuel?
Oxidation
Combustion is exothermic, releasing heat and light; the flame appears 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 tetrahedron adds a fourth: the chemical chain reaction that keeps it going.
Q 03What shape does a flame take in the microgravity of space?
Spherical
Without convection it also burns bluer and more efficiently, and NASA found more soot gets fully burned.
Q 04When a hydrocarbon flame gets enough air, what colour does it turn?
Blue
The yellow of a candle comes from glowing soot; with full combustion no soot or carbon monoxide forms.
Q 05Which French chemist proposed in 1777 that combustion involves a component of air he named oxygène?
Antoine Lavoisier
His theory replaced phlogiston, which had dominated chemistry for nearly two centuries.
Q 06Charred bones deep in Wonderwerk Cave, evidence of human use of fire, date back how far?
1.79 million years
The cave is in South Africa; the oldest clear evidence of deliberately making fire is around 400,000 years old, in England.
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 09The Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome were priestesses tending the sacred flame of which goddess?
Vesta
They were chosen before puberty for a college of six and governed by the pontifex maximus.
Q 10Which religion holds fire so sacred that its places of worship are known as fire temples?
Zoroastrianism
Fire, or atar, is a symbol of Ahura Mazda; the first fire temple was said to be built at Kashmar.
Q 11The Great Fire of Rome broke out in July of which year, during Nero's reign?
AD 64
It burned six days, reignited for three more, and Nero blamed the Christians, according to Tacitus.
Q 12The 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 13How many deaths from the Great Fire of London are traditionally recorded?
Six
Historians suspect the true toll was higher; hiring a cart to flee cost as much as £40 that Monday.
How tall is the Monument to the Great Fire, designed by Wren and Hooke near where the blaze began?
Q 21What share of wildfires in the United States are started by human activity?
Over 85%
Natural causes include lightning, volcanoes, sparks from rockfalls and spontaneous combustion.
Q 22How 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 23Which 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.
202 feet
Built between 1671 and 1676; an inscription added in 1681 blamed 'Popish frenzy'.
Q 15Roughly how many people did the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 kill?
300
It destroyed 17,000 structures and left 100,000 homeless; the O'Leary cow story is unproven, and one account blames 'Peg-Leg' Sullivan's lantern.
Q 16How many firefighters did the Chicago Fire Department have to protect the whole city in 1871?
185
They had just 17 horse-drawn steam pumpers.
Q 17The 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 18The 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 19A gigantic fire whirl killed about 38,000 people in Tokyo in the aftermath of which 1923 disaster?
The Great Kantō earthquake
Fire whirls also helped spread the Great Chicago Fire.
Q 20A coal-seam fire has burned beneath which anthracite-country town since at least May 1962?
Centralia
It could burn for 250 more years; the population fell from 1,500 to five by 2017.
Q 24The key innovation of the safety match was putting which substance on a separate striking surface?
Red phosphorus
That kept the dangerous phosphorus off the match head; Gustaf Pasch patented the idea.
Q 25Zippo lighters have been made since 1932 in Bradford, in which state?
Pennsylvania
George Blaisdell chose the name because he liked the sound of the word 'zipper'.
Q 26At which German university, newly fitted with coal-gas lines, was the Bunsen burner designed in the 1850s?
Heidelberg
Robert Bunsen himself burned coal gas; today they run on methane or propane.
Q 27The first fire extinguisher on record was patented in England in 1723 by which chemist?
Ambrose Godfrey
Captain Manby's pressurised 'Extincteur' of 1816 held three gallons of pearl-ash solution under compressed air.
Q 28Frederick Graff, who patented the first cast-iron fire hydrants in 1801, ran which city's water works?
Philadelphia
Earlier hydrant patents were lost when the US Patent Office itself burned down in 1836.
Q 29Which Alexandrian inventor built the first fire pump around the 2nd century BC?
Ctesibius
The first self-propelled steam pumper fire engine was built in New York in 1841.
Q 30The first automatic electric fire alarm was patented in 1890 by an associate of which inventor?
Thomas Edison
Francis Robbins Upton held the patent; the first cheap home smoke detector came in 1965.