179 free Phone trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free Phone trivia questions with answers. Phone trivia covering the whole history of the thing in your pocket. It starts with Alexander Graham Bell's disputed patent and the words he said to Watson, moves through the undertaker who invented the automatic exchange, why old dials had letters, the world's first emergency number and the 555 numbers movies use, then jumps to cell phones: Martin Cooper's 1973 call to his rival at Bell Labs, the $3,995 DynaTAC brick, the first text message, the indestructible Nokia 3310, the Razr, the CrackBerry, the day Steve Jobs announced three products that were one, and the little green robot that now runs most of the world's phones. Easy questions any smartphone owner will get open the set; the later ones - which Deutsche Telekom engineer chose 160 characters, which Alabama town made the first 911 call, how long a DynaTAC took to charge - will test a proper gadget historian. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its citation.
30 of 179 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Alexander Graham Bell say to his assistant in the first intelligible telephone call in March 1876?
'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you'
Bell later refused to keep a telephone in his study, calling his invention an intrusion on his real work.
Q 02In which city was Alexander Graham Bell born in 1847?
Edinburgh
Both his mother and his wife were deaf, which shaped his work on speech and hearing; he died in Nova Scotia in 1922.
Q 03What happened across North American telephone networks during Bell's funeral in 1922?
Service observed a moment of silence
Bell also served as the second president of the National Geographic Society and wrote for its magazine as H. A. Largelamb.
Q 04Which Italian inventor's telephone work was acknowledged by a US House resolution in 2002?
Antonio Meucci
Credit for the telephone has always been disputed; Elisha Gray filed a caveat the same day as Bell's patent application.
Q 05Which German inventor transmitted voice by electric signals in 1861, fifteen years before Bell?
Johann Philipp Reis
The word telephone itself comes from Greek for 'far' and 'voice'.
Q 06Almon Strowger, who patented the automatic telephone exchange in 1892, worked in which trade?
Undertaker
The Kansas City funeral director suspected switchboard operators of sending his customers to a rival.
Q 07Why did old rotary dials carry letters as well as numbers?
To represent telephone exchange names
Numbers were remembered as names like REgent 7-3456; the letters live on in vanity numbers today.
Q 08Touch-Tone push-button dialling made its public debut at which event?
The 1962 Seattle World's Fair
Push-button service began replacing rotary in 1963; we still say 'dial' a number decades after dials vanished.
Q 09Which city introduced 999, the world's first emergency telephone number, on 30 June 1937?
London
The trigger was a 1935 house fire in Wimpole Street in which callers could not reach the operator quickly enough.
Q 10The first 911 call in the United States was made in February 1968 from which small town?
Haleyville, Alabama
911 was not widely adopted across North America until the 1980s; Europe settled on 112 in 1991.
Q 11Which number is the standard emergency number on GSM mobile networks worldwide and across the EU?
112
Australia uses 000, chosen partly because it suited remote automatic exchanges; Japan uses 110 for police and 119 for fire.
Q 12Which range of 555 numbers is officially reserved for fictional use in North American films and TV?
555-0100 to 555-0199
The famous 555-2368 has served The Rockford Files and Ghostbusters; real subscribers with 867-5309 got a flood of calls after the song.
Q 13Who is credited with inventing the coin-operated payphone in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1889?
William Gray
Payphones have all but vanished; New York was down to four booths on the Upper West Side, with outgoing calls made free.
Q 21How did Deutsche Telekom's Friedhelm Hillebrand arrive at the 160-character SMS limit in 1984?
He typed random sentences on a typewriter and counted
By 2007 about 2.4 billion of the world's 3.3 billion mobile subscribers were texting.
Q 22Which predictive-text system let people type words on a numeric keypad with one press per letter?
T9
It sometimes made messages longer, because a full dictionary word took more presses than a shortcut like 'gr8'.
Q 23Roughly how many Nokia 3310 handsets were sold after its launch in September 2000?
126 million
Q 14Britain's red telephone kiosks, including the K6 of 1935, were designed by which architect?
Giles Gilbert Scott
Scott also designed Liverpool's Anglican cathedral and Battersea Power Station; BT still owns the rights to the kiosk design.
Q 15Which 1960s spy comedy used a phone booth as a secret entrance to headquarters?
Get Smart
Superman famously used booths for a costume change; the Mojave phone booth in the California desert became a cult destination.
Q 16Motorola's Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call on 3 April 1973. Whom did he call?
A rival engineer at Bell Labs
Joel Engel was leading AT&T's competing car-phone effort; the prototype weighed 2 kg and lasted 30 minutes on a charge.
Q 17How much did the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the first handheld cell phone, cost at its 1984 launch?
$3,995
About $12,800 in 2025 money for 30 minutes of talk time and a 10-hour recharge; it weighed roughly 790 grams.
Q 18What nickname did the DynaTAC's bulky shape earn it?
The brick
The FCC approved it on 21 September 1983; Motorola's MicroTAC (1989) and StarTAC (1996) shrank it dramatically.
Q 19Which country launched the world's first commercial cellular network, in 1979?
Japan
The Nordic NMT system followed in 1981; digital GSM went live commercially in Finland in 1991.
Q 20What did the world's first SMS text message, sent on 3 December 1992, say?
'Merry Christmas'
Engineer Neil Papworth sent it from a computer over Vodafone's network to Richard Jarvis at a party in Newbury.
Its reputation for surviving anything became an internet meme; HMD Global relaunched a colour-screen version for 49 euros in 2017.
Q 24Which game came pre-loaded on the Nokia 3310 and became an icon of early mobile gaming?
Snake II
The 3310 shipped with four games and swappable Xpress-On covers in thousands of designs.
Q 25The Motorola Razr V3, released in 2004, holds which sales record?
Best-selling clamshell phone of all time
About 130 million were sold; its 13 mm aluminium body made it a mid-2000s design icon.
Q 26Which Canadian company, based in Waterloo, Ontario, launched the first BlackBerry in 1999?
Research In Motion
The first model was a two-way pager; at its 2011-12 peak the brand had about 85 million subscribers.
Q 27What addiction-themed nickname for the BlackBerry entered Webster's New World College Dictionary in 2006?
CrackBerry
President Obama famously refused to give his up; the company stopped designing its own phones in 2016.
Q 28By early 2016, roughly what share of the smartphone market did BlackBerry hold?
0.2%
The iPhone and Android had eaten its lunch; BlackBerry's own web services were switched off in January 2022.
Q 29Which 1993 IBM device is often called the first smartphone?
IBM Simon
It had a touchscreen, email and a calendar more than a decade before the iPhone.
Q 30Where did Steve Jobs unveil the first iPhone on 9 January 2007?
Macworld
He teased it as three products - a widescreen iPod, a phone and an internet communicator - before revealing they were one.