Patents
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40 free Patents trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A patent is a bargain: tell the world how your invention works, and for a limited time nobody else may make or sell it without your permission. That simple deal has shaped everything from early telephones to smartphones, and it has produced centuries of feuds, lucky breaks and strange paperwork along the way. This patent quiz covers the whole story. There are questions on the earliest patent laws and grants, the offices that examine applications today, and the vocabulary every inventor meets. You will also find famous inventors and their rivals, courtroom battles between household-name companies, people who gave their ideas away for nothing, and film stars, singers and writers who turned out to be patent holders. It is written for curious general players as much as for law students, engineers and quiz hosts looking for a themed round. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story behind each patent as you play.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US president, the only one granted a patent, designed a device to lift riverboats over shoals?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln received Patent No. 6,469 in 1849, more than a decade before he reached the White House. His inflatable bellows for stranded boats was never produced for practical use.
Q 02In which Swiss city did Albert Einstein work as a patent examiner while developing special relativity?
Bern
Bern is where Einstein spent seven years judging other people's inventions, among them a gravel sorter and an electric typewriter. He wrote his landmark 1905 papers while holding the job.
Q 03Which carmaker let its rivals use engineer Nils Bohlin's three-point seat belt patent free of charge?
Volvo
Volvo gave the patent away in the interest of safety instead of charging rivals for it. The belt became standard equipment in its own cars in 1959.
Q 04Which Hollywood star co-patented a frequency-hopping radio system meant to stop enemies jamming Allied torpedoes?
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr devised the scheme with composer George Antheil, who had once written a film score for sixteen synchronised player pianos. The US Navy turned the idea down, and the pair took it no further.
Q 05Which pop star co-patented shoes that hook onto stage pegs, letting dancers lean far past their centre of gravity?
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson faked the 45-degree lean in the Smooth Criminal video with cables and a harness. To repeat it in concert, his team patented heels that hitch onto pegs rising from the floor.
Q 06Which vaccine pioneer chose not to patent his work, asking a TV interviewer whether anyone could patent the sun?
Jonas Salk
Jonas Salk told broadcaster Edward Murrow in 1955 that his polio vaccine belonged to the people. His backers had in fact looked into a patent and judged the methods probably not novel enough to earn one.
Q 07Which board game did Charles Darrow patent in 1935, decades after Lizzie Magie patented her similar Landlord's Game?
Monopoly
Monopoly went to Parker Brothers, which bought Magie's patent for $500 on learning Darrow was not the sole inventor. She had created her game to show the harm done when a few owners hold all the wealth.
Q 08Which inventor's first patent, for an electric vote recorder politicians refused to use, was followed by 1,092 more?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison decided after that flop never again to waste time inventing things nobody wanted. His later patents covered the phonograph, electric lighting and the movie camera.
Q 09Which American landmark was covered by a US design patent in 1879, while it was still being built?
Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty was covered by patent D11,023 seven years before it was dedicated in New York Harbor. Its French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, was protecting the look of the monument, not any mechanism.
Q 10Which carmaker announced in 2014 that it would not sue anyone using its electric vehicle patents in good faith?
Tesla
Tesla took down the wall of patents in the lobby of its Palo Alto headquarters as part of the gesture. Elon Musk wrote that the real competition was the flood of petrol cars, not rival electric ones.
Q 11Which fairy-tale creature names firms that make nothing but buy up patents in order to demand licence fees?
Troll
Troll stuck as the insult after a 1994 educational video showed a green one guarding a bridge and demanding fees. Lawyers at Intel are often credited with spreading the label.
Q 12Which kind of intellectual property guards the Coca-Cola formula indefinitely, where a patent would have expired?
Trade secret
Trade secret protection needs no registration and lasts for as long as the recipe stays hidden. The company keeps its written copy of the formula in a vault on public display in Atlanta.
Q 13For which kind of device does the US Patent Office still insist that inventors supply a working model?
Perpetual motion machines
Q 21Which rival's lawyer filed a telephone claim at the US Patent Office on the same day as Alexander Graham Bell's?
Elisha Gray
Elisha Gray's lawyer lodged his caveat on 14 February 1876, with a diagram much like one Bell later drew in his own notebook. Arguments over who copied whom have never died down.
Q 22Which aviation pioneer did the Wright brothers sue for years, saying his ailerons copied their patented controls?
Glenn Curtiss
Glenn Curtiss lost the first ruling in 1910 and an appeal in 1914, yet the fight dragged on. It ended in 1917, when the US government pressed both firms into a patent pool so that warplanes could be built.
Q 23Which carmaker refused to pay royalties on George Selden's automobile patent and won his appeal in 1911?
Perpetual motion machines are the one exception in the examiners' manual, because so many people have claimed to build one. Until 1880 American inventors generally had to send in a model with their application.
Q 14Which type of US patent covers how an invention works, protecting new processes, machines and compositions of matter?
Utility
Utility patents once lasted 17 years from the day they were issued. Since 1995 the clock has run for 20 years from the filing date instead, with extra time added when the patent office causes delays.
Q 15Which two-word legal term covers everything already public that could show an invention is not new?
Prior art
Prior art need not be written down: a public talk, or simply using an invention in plain view, can count against a later application. Traditional medicine has been cited as well.
Q 16Royal 'letters patent', which gave patents their name, took that label from a Latin word meaning what?
Open
Open is the meaning: letters patent were written on unfolded parchment for anyone to read, unlike sealed 'letters close'. An inventor today still has to publish the invention to win protection.
Q 17Which Italian republic passed the first general patent statute in 1474, giving inventors ten years of protection?
Venice
Venice barred copies of any new device made without its maker's consent, and historians usually call the law the first patent statute. Some argue it merely wrote down existing custom.
Q 18Which founding American document lets Congress grant inventors exclusive rights to their discoveries for limited times?
The Constitution
The Constitution lists the power in Article I, in a clause that covers authors' writings as well. James Madison was among the delegates who proposed it.
Q 19What name is given to cheaper copies of a medicine that rivals may sell once its patent expires?
Generic drugs
Generic drugs contain the same active substance as the branded original and work the same way. Makers of the original sometimes find ways to stretch their patents and hold them off, a practice known as evergreening.
Q 20Which city is home to the World Intellectual Property Organization, the UN agency for international patent filings?
Geneva
Geneva has hosted the agency since it began work on 26 April 1970, a date now marked every year as World Intellectual Property Day. One filing there can start claims in over 150 countries.
Henry Ford
Henry Ford persuaded the court that his engines were based on the Otto engine, not the Brayton type in the patent. Selden, a patent lawyer, had filed in 1879 but was not granted it until 1895.
Q 24Which photography giant had to abandon instant cameras and pay Polaroid over $900 million for infringing its patents?
Kodak
Kodak had once been a customer for Polaroid's polarising products. When it launched instant cameras of its own in 1976, Polaroid sued and asked for $12 billion.
Q 25Which online retailer patented one-click ordering in 1999 and later charged Apple $1 million to use it?
Amazon
Amazon kept the patent until it expired in September 2017. Apple took its licence in 2000 and went on to add the feature to the iTunes Store.
Q 26Samuel Hopkins won the first US patent in 1790 for a better way of making which soap and bleaching ingredient?
Potash
Potash was made by soaking wood ashes in water in a pot, which is how it got its name. George Washington signed the patent himself.
Q 27Which Secretary of State headed the first US patent review board, though he never patented his own improved plough?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson at first opposed patents altogether, then spent three years leading the three-person board that judged every application. He left his plough unpatented, as a gift to posterity.
Q 28Which television pioneer beat RCA in a patent contest thanks partly to a blackboard sketch from his school days?
Philo Farnsworth
Philo Farnsworth had drawn his idea for electronic television for a chemistry teacher, and the drawing was reproduced as evidence. He had earlier refused $100,000 from RCA for his patents.
Q 29The first US patent pool, formed in 1856, ended years of lawsuits among rival makers of which household item?
Sewing machines
Sewing machines were caught in a thicket of rival patents nicknamed the Sewing Machine War, until Elias Howe, Isaac Singer and others pooled theirs. The pool lasted until its last patent expired in 1877.
Q 30Which Smithsonian museum shares the Old Patent Office Building, where Walt Whitman read to wounded soldiers?
National Portrait Gallery
The National Portrait Gallery shares the building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During the Civil War its halls served as a barracks, a hospital and a morgue.