Historical Trivia Facts
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98 free Historical Trivia Facts trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Historical trivia facts are the ones that make you say 'wait, really?' A war that lasted less than an hour. Woolly mammoths still alive while the Great Pyramid was being built. A tsar who taxed beards. A president whose grandson was alive in 2025. Nintendo founded in 1889. Every question in this quiz is built around a fact like that, drawn from ancient Rome and Egypt, medieval Europe, the age of empires and the twentieth century. The set is written for curious adults and older students rather than specialists. Some questions are easy if you have heard the story before; others are genuinely obscure. Along the way it quietly corrects a few things everyone gets wrong: nobody at Salem was burned, Washington's teeth were not wooden, Nero could not have played a fiddle, and the Great Wall is not visible from the Moon. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference source, usually the encyclopaedia entry for the event, and each question shows its source after you answer, so you can go and read the whole strange story yourself.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The shortest recorded war, between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted roughly how long?
About 40 minutes
About 40 minutes: British shelling had stopped by 9:40 that morning, and Sultan Khalid was later smuggled out to the African mainland.
Q 02Teaching at which university is documented as early as 1096?
Oxford
Oxford: teaching there is recorded in 1096, and in 1209 scholars fleeing hostile Oxford townsmen settled in Cambridge and founded its rival.
Q 03The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?
Pudding Lane
The fire began on 2 September 1666 in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane and went on to destroy more than 13,000 houses and St Paul's Cathedral.
Q 04Which US agency was founded in 1865 to fight counterfeit money?
The Secret Service
The Secret Service was created in 1865 inside the Treasury to suppress counterfeit currency; it took on full-time presidential protection only after William McKinley's assassination in 1901.
Q 05By legend, Caligula planned to give which office to his favourite horse, Incitatus?
Consul
Consul, Rome's top elected office: Suetonius says only that Caligula is said to have planned it, and some scholars read the story as a stunt to humiliate the Senate.
Q 06Which woman helped turn the Hundred Years' War in France's favour?
Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc lifted the siege of Orléans in 1429 and was burned in 1431, yet France won in 1453, ending a 'Hundred Years' War' that lasted 116 years.
Q 07Which people built the settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, about 500 years before Columbus?
The Norse (Vikings)
The Norse (Vikings) settlement lay unrecognized until 1960, when local George Decker led explorer Helge Ingstad to its grass-covered mounds.
Q 08Woolly mammoths survived where in the Arctic until about 2000 BC, centuries after the Great Pyramid was finished?
Wrangel Island
Wrangel Island's mammoths were cut off about 10,000 years ago, yet the small herd stayed stable for some 6,000 years before dying out.
Q 09Which video game company was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards?
Nintendo
Nintendo stayed a card maker for decades, and putting Walt Disney characters on its cards in the late 1950s set off a sales boom.
Q 10Alexander Bain's 1843 patent, decades before the telephone, was an early version of which device?
The fax machine
The fax machine idea was put to work in 1865, when Giovanni Caselli's similar equipment began a commercial service between Paris and Lyon.
Q 11What saved the Eiffel Tower from demolition 20 years after the 1889 World's Fair?
Its usefulness as a radio antenna
Its usefulness as a radio antenna persuaded Paris to spare the tower in 1909, and in World War I its radio station intercepted enemy messages.
Q 12As a young man, Julius Caesar was kidnapped and held for ransom by whom?
Pirates
Pirates seized the young Caesar near the island of Pharmacusa, and Plutarch says that once ransomed he returned with ships and crucified them, as he had jokingly threatened.
Q 13Tsar Peter the Great of Russia introduced a tax on what?
Beards
Beards: Peter wanted Russians to look like Western Europeans, so men who kept their beards had to pay and carry a token as proof.
Q 21For most of their history, athletes at the ancient Olympic Games competed how?
Naked
Naked: Pausanias tells of Orsippus, who won at Olympia running naked, and believed he let his loincloth slip on purpose because a naked man runs more easily.
Q 22How were the nineteen people executed for witchcraft at Salem in 1692 put to death?
By hanging
By hanging: English law, which ruled Massachusetts, made witchcraft a felony punished by the noose, while burning was the penalty for heresy elsewhere in Europe.
Q 23After President Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, which scientist was offered the presidency of Israel and declined?
Albert Einstein
Q 14Which US president, born in 1790, had a grandson who lived until 2025?
John Tyler
John Tyler was 63 when his son Lyon was born, and Lyon was 75 when Harrison Ruffin Tyler arrived in 1928; Harrison died in May 2025 aged 96.
Q 15France's final execution, carried out in 1977, used which method?
The guillotine
The guillotine killed Hamida Djandoubi in Marseille in September 1977, and four years later France abolished the death penalty altogether.
Q 16Which country's parliament, the Althing, was established in 930 and claims to be the oldest in the world?
Iceland
Iceland's Althing voted in about 1000 to make the whole country Christian, yet it still allowed pagans to worship the old gods in private.
Q 17When John Pemberton's cola launched in Atlanta in 1886, its two key ingredients were caffeine and what?
Cocaine
Cocaine from coca leaves gave Coca-Cola half its name, but the amount fell to mere traces in the early 1900s and was gone by about 1930.
Q 18Which European country's men voted against women's suffrage in 1959 before approving it in 1971?
Switzerland
Switzerland still had one canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, refusing women a local vote until the Federal Supreme Court forced it to in 1990.
Q 19Which self-governing country was the first to give all women the vote in national elections, in 1893?
New Zealand
New Zealand women won the vote in 1893, yet they could not stand for Parliament until 1919, and no woman won a seat until 1933.
Q 20What did Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, say about the Great Wall after his 2003 flight?
He could not see it
He could not see it, Yang said, yet in 2004 a photo taken from the International Space Station by astronaut Leroy Chiao was found to show small sections of the wall.
Albert Einstein was offered the post after Weizmann's death in November 1952 and declined, saying he lacked both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people.
Q 24What made the Leaning Tower of Pisa start to lean?
Soft, unstable ground
Soft, unstable ground made the tower sink by 1178, and a pause of nearly a century let the soil firm up; had building gone on, it would almost certainly have toppled.
Q 25Mansa Musa reportedly spent so much gold on his 1324 pilgrimage that its value fell for years in which city?
Cairo
Cairo: al-Umari reported that gold there stayed cheaper for years afterwards, yet on the way home Musa went into debt to Egyptian merchants.
Q 26Which material did a long-running legend wrongly claim George Washington's false teeth were made from?
Wood
Wood never went into any of his dentures, which used ivory, metal and human teeth; stained ivory may have given them a wooden look.
Q 27Where does Tacitus say Nero was when the Great Fire of Rome broke out in AD 64?
At Antium, outside the city
At Antium, outside the city, Tacitus says, and Nero did not return until the flames neared his palace, then opened even his own gardens to shelter the homeless.
Q 28Which element contaminates Marie Curie's laboratory notebooks, so that readers must wear protective clothing?
Radium
Radium, which Curie discovered with her husband Pierre, has a half-life of about 1,600 years, so the notebooks will stay radioactive for well over a thousand years.
Q 29What kind of entertainment was a Roman 'naumachia'?
A staged naval battle
A staged naval battle: Titus put on two naumachiae for the Colosseum's opening games in AD 80, one of them reportedly inside the flooded new amphitheatre itself.
Q 30Why did Herostratus burn down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BC?
To make his name famous forever
To make his name famous forever: a decree then barred anyone from naming him, yet the historian Theopompus recorded his name anyway.