50 free Historical Trivia Facts trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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
British ships opened fire at 9:02 in the morning and the sultan's palace had surrendered by about 9:40.
Q 02Teaching at which university is documented as early as 1096?
Oxford
That makes it the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Tenochtitlan's traditional founding date is 1325.
Q 03The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?
Pudding Lane
It destroyed more than 13,000 houses and St Paul's Cathedral, yet only a handful of deaths were officially recorded.
Q 04Which agency, approved by Lincoln the day he was shot, was founded in 1865 to fight counterfeit money?
The Secret Service
It only took on presidential protection after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.
Q 05By legend, Caligula planned to give which office to his favourite horse, Incitatus?
Consul
Ancient sources say it never actually happened. The story may have been a joke at the Senate's expense.
Q 06How many years did the Hundred Years' War between England and France actually last?
116
It ran, with long truces, from 1337 to 1453 and ended with England holding almost nothing in France but Calais.
Q 07L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the only confirmed North American settlement of which people?
The Norse (Vikings)
Roughly five centuries before Columbus. Tree-ring evidence pins Norse activity there to the year 1021.
Q 08Woolly mammoths survived where in the Arctic until about 2000 BC, centuries after the Great Pyramid was finished?
Wrangel Island
The island's isolated herd, off the coast of Siberia, outlived every mainland mammoth by thousands of years.
Q 09Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make what?
Playing cards
Its hanafuda 'flower cards' are still sold today. It did not release a video game until the 1970s.
Q 10Alexander Bain's 1843 'electric printing telegraph' patent was an early version of which device?
The fax machine
A commercial fax service ran between Paris and Lyon in 1865, eleven years before the telephone was invented.
Q 11What saved the Eiffel Tower from being dismantled 20 years after the 1889 World's Fair?
Its usefulness as a radio antenna
It stayed the tallest structure on Earth for 41 years, until New York's Chrysler Building topped it in 1930.
Q 12As a young man, Julius Caesar was kidnapped and held for ransom by whom?
Pirates
Plutarch says he joked with his captors that he would come back and crucify them, and then did. Later historians think the pirates were more likely sold into slavery.
Q 13In 1698 Tsar Peter the Great of Russia introduced a tax on what?
Beards
Q 21For most of their history, athletes at the ancient Olympic Games competed how?
Naked
The Games were held every four years at Olympia from 776 BC, and the prize was an olive wreath.
Q 22In January 1943, US officials briefly banned the sale of what as a wartime conservation measure?
Sliced bread
The idea was to save the wax paper and steel used by slicing machines. The public outcry was so loud the ban was lifted after about seven weeks.
Q 23How were the nineteen people executed for witchcraft at Salem in 1692 put to death?
By hanging
One more man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea. Nobody at Salem was burned.
Men who paid carried a copper or silver 'beard token' as proof. The tax was meant to push Russians toward clean-shaven Western fashions.
Q 14John Tyler, the tenth US president, was born in 1790. His last surviving grandson died in which year?
2025
Harrison Ruffin Tyler was born in 1928, when his grandfather had been dead for 66 years. Both the president and his son had children very late in life.
Q 15In what year did France carry out its last execution by guillotine?
1977
Hamida Djandoubi was executed in Marseille that September, a few months after Star Wars opened in cinemas. France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
Q 16Which country's parliament, the Althing, was established in 930 and claims to be the oldest in the world?
Iceland
It first met at Þingvellir, an open-air site on a rift valley where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart.
Q 17When Coca-Cola launched in 1886, its two key ingredients were caffeine and what?
Cocaine
It was sold as a patent medicine and temperance drink. Fresh coca leaves were dropped from the recipe in 1903.
Q 18In which year did women in Switzerland gain the right to vote in federal elections?
1971
One canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, held out on local votes until the federal supreme court forced it in 1990.
Q 19Which country was the first to give all women the vote in national elections, in 1893?
New Zealand
Women voted for the first time that November, ten weeks after the law passed.
Q 20What did China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, say about the Great Wall after his 2003 spaceflight?
That he had not been able to see it
NASA says the wall is barely visible from low orbit even in perfect conditions and no more conspicuous than a highway. The Moon claim is a myth.
Q 24After President Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, which scientist was offered the presidency of Israel and declined?
Albert Einstein
He said he had neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal with human beings.
Q 25Construction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa took place in three stages over roughly how many years?
199
It began to sink while the second floor was going up in 1178. The long pauses for war may have let the soil settle enough to stop it falling over.
Q 26Mansa Musa gave away so much gold on his 1324 pilgrimage that gold prices fell for years in which city?
Cairo
A gold mithqal dropped from 25 silver dirhams to under 22 and stayed there for at least twelve years.
Q 27Liechtenstein reportedly sent 80 soldiers to the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. How many came back?
81
The extra man was probably an Austrian liaison officer, or an Italian who tagged along. Liechtenstein disbanded its army entirely two years later.
Q 28George Washington's false teeth included ivory, brass, gold and human teeth. What were they not made of?
Wood
The wooden-teeth story appeared in school textbooks well into the twentieth century.
Q 29According to the historian Tacitus, where was Nero when the Great Fire of Rome broke out in AD 64?
At Antium, outside the city
Tacitus says he hurried back to organise relief. The instrument he supposedly played would have been a lyre; the fiddle did not exist yet.
Q 30More than a century after her death, Marie Curie's papers are still kept how?
In lead-lined boxes because they are radioactive
Readers must wear protective clothing. Even her cookbook is contaminated. She remains the only person with Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.