Phone Trivia
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177 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.
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Q 01What did Alexander Graham Bell say to his assistant in the first intelligible telephone call, on 10 March 1876?
'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you'
'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you' was the line; 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
Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 3 March 1847; the family emigrated to Canada in 1870, and 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
Service observed a moment of silence: on 4 August 1922, as Bell was buried, every telephone in North America stopped for one minute in tribute.
Q 04Which Italian inventor's telephone work was acknowledged by a US House resolution in 2002?
Antonio Meucci
Antonio Meucci demonstrated a voice-transmitting device in the 1850s; House Resolution 269 of June 2002 acknowledged his work, and Canada's parliament reaffirmed Bell days later.
Q 05Which German inventor transmitted voice by electric signals in 1861, fifteen years before Bell?
Johann Philipp Reis
Johann Philipp Reis demonstrated his 'Telephon' to the Frankfurt Physical Society in October 1861, sending sound electrically fifteen years before Bell's 1876 patent.
Q 06Almon Strowger, who patented the automatic telephone exchange in 1891, worked in which trade?
Undertaker
Strowger was an undertaker in Kansas City who suspected switchboard operators of steering his customers to a rival; his 1891 patent led to the first automatic exchange at La Porte, Indiana, in 1892.
Q 07Why did old rotary dials carry letters as well as numbers?
To represent telephone exchange names
The letters represented telephone exchange names: a number was remembered as REgent 7-3456, with the first two letters of the exchange dialled as digits.
Q 08Touch-Tone push-button dialling made its public debut at which event?
The 1962 Seattle World's Fair
Touch-Tone dialling was demonstrated to the public at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair; Bell System commercial service began in Carnegie and Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1963.
Q 09Which city introduced 999, the world's first emergency telephone number, on 30 June 1937?
London
London launched 999 on 30 June 1937, prompted by a 1935 Wimpole Street house fire 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
Haleyville, Alabama, placed the first US 911 call on 16 February 1968, made by Alabama House Speaker Rankin Fite; Europe later settled on 112 in 1991.
Q 11Which number is the standard emergency number on GSM mobile networks worldwide and across the EU?
112
112 is the emergency number built into every GSM handset and adopted EU-wide in 1991; Australia uses 000 and Japan 110 for police, 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
555-0100 to 555-0199 was set aside for fiction by the North American Numbering Plan Administrator in 1994; Ghostbusters' 555-2368 predates that reservation.
Q 13Who is credited with inventing the coin-operated payphone in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1889?
William Gray
Q 21Which predictive-text system let people type words on a numeric keypad with one press per letter?
T9
T9 (Text on 9 keys), developed by Tegic in the 1990s, guessed the intended word from one press per letter; a dictionary word could take more presses than 'gr8'.
Q 22Roughly how many Nokia 3310 handsets were sold after its launch in September 2000?
126 million
Around 126 million Nokia 3310s were sold after the September 2000 launch; the 133-gram handset's reputation for surviving anything became an internet meme.
Q 23Which game came pre-loaded on the Nokia 3310 and became an icon of early mobile gaming?
Snake II
Snake II shipped on the Nokia 3310 alongside Pairs II, Space Impact and Bantumi; steering the growing snake around a monochrome screen became the icon of early mobile gaming.
William Gray installed the first coin-operated payphone at a Hartford bank in 1889 and founded the Gray Telephone Pay Station Company; early models collected the coin after the call.
Q 14Britain's red telephone kiosks, including the K6 of 1935, were designed by which architect?
Giles Gilbert Scott
Giles Gilbert Scott designed the K2 kiosk in 1924 and the K6 for George V's 1935 Silver Jubilee; he also designed Liverpool's Anglican cathedral and Battersea Power Station.
Q 15Which 1960s spy comedy used a phone booth as a secret entrance to headquarters?
Get Smart
Get Smart (1965–70) opened with Maxwell Smart dropping into CONTROL headquarters through the floor of a phone booth; Superman used booths for costume changes.
Q 16How much did the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the first handheld cell phone, cost at its 1984 launch?
$3,995
The DynaTAC 8000X listed at $3,995 in 1984, roughly $12,000 in 2025 dollars, for a handset weighing close to 790 grams with an LED display.
Q 17What nickname did the DynaTAC's bulky shape earn it?
The brick
The brick phone, as users called it, received FCC approval on 21 September 1983; it stood 25 cm tall and weighed about 790 grams.
Q 18Which 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 19What did the world's first SMS text message, sent on 3 December 1992, say?
'Merry Christmas'
'Merry Christmas' was typed by engineer Neil Papworth on a computer and sent over Vodafone's network to Richard Jarvis's Orbitel 901 handset on 3 December 1992.
Q 20How did German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand arrive at the 160-character SMS limit?
He typed random sentences on a typewriter and counted
He typed random sentences on a typewriter and counted: nearly all fitted in 160 characters, which also suited GSM's signalling channel; by 2007 about 2.4 billion subscribers were texting.
Q 24The Motorola Razr V3, released in 2004, holds which sales record?
Best-selling clamshell phone of all time
The Razr V3 is the best-selling clamshell phone of all time at about 130 million units; its 13 mm aluminium body made it a mid-2000s design icon.
Q 25Which 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 26What addiction-themed nickname for the BlackBerry entered Webster's New World College Dictionary in 2006?
CrackBerry
'CrackBerry' was Webster's New World College Dictionary's 2006 Word of the Year; President Obama kept his BlackBerry in office, and the company stopped designing its own phones in 2016.
Q 27By early 2016, roughly what share of the smartphone market did BlackBerry hold?
0.2%
BlackBerry's share had fallen to about 0.2% by early 2016 as iPhone and Android took the market; its own web services were switched off in January 2022.
Q 28Which US carrier sold the IBM Simon Personal Communicator when it went on sale in 1994?
BellSouth
BellSouth Cellular sold the IBM Simon from August 1994 at $899 with a two-year contract; about 50,000 units were sold in six months.
Q 29Where did Steve Jobs unveil the first iPhone on 9 January 2007?
Macworld
At Macworld Expo in San Francisco on 9 January 2007, Jobs teased three products – a widescreen iPod, a phone and an internet communicator – before revealing they were one.
Q 30How much did the 8 GB first-generation iPhone cost at launch, with a two-year AT&T contract?
$599
The 8 GB iPhone launched at $599 with a two-year AT&T contract and the 4 GB at $499; Apple cut the 8 GB price to $399 that September.