Radio Trivia
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This radio trivia quiz has 148 free questions with answers and runs the whole history of the medium: Maxwell and Hertz proving the waves existed, Marconi and Fessenden putting them to work, the first stations, the Golden Age of network drama and comedy, wartime propaganda, the transistor pocket radio, pirate ships, Top 40, payola, talk radio and satellite subscription services. It is built for pub-quiz regulars, broadcasting students, ham operators and anyone who grew up with a dial glued to one station. Questions range from easy (what AM stands for) to genuinely hard (which battery Sony's 1957 pocket radio popularised). Every answer was checked against a primary source or an encyclopaedia entry before publication, and each question shows its citation, so you can settle arguments as well as start them.
30 of 148 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which physicist shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marconi for wireless telegraphy?
Ferdinand Braun
Braun invented the cathode-ray tube oscilloscope and a crystal detector; the two laureates never worked together.
Q 02Where did Marconi report hearing the letter S sent across the Atlantic from Cornwall on 12 December 1901?
Signal Hill, Newfoundland
Signal Hill, Newfoundland: on 12 December 1901 Marconi reported hearing three clicks, the Morse letter S, sent from Poldhu in Cornwall; nothing recorded it, so historians have long debated what he heard.
Q 03Roughly how long was the kite-supported receiving antenna Marconi used for his 1901 transatlantic test?
500 feet
The kite hoisted roughly 500 feet of wire into the sky over Signal Hill on 12 December 1901; the transmitting station at Poldhu in Cornwall supplied the power.
Q 04Marconi's mother Annie was the granddaughter of the founder of which famous drinks company?
Jameson whiskey
Jameson whiskey: Annie Jameson was a granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of the Dublin distillery; her family's connections helped Marconi find backers in Britain when Italy showed little interest.
Q 05Marconi was born in 1874 in which Italian city?
Bologna
Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna on 25 April 1874; as a teenager he was introduced to physicist Augusto Righi of the University of Bologna, who let him use the physics laboratory.
Q 06At the hour of Marconi's funeral in 1937, radio transmitters around the world fell silent for how long?
Two minutes
Two minutes: after Marconi died in Rome on 20 July 1937, radio stations around the world observed a two-minute silence in tribute on the day of his funeral.
Q 07Marconi was offered free passage on the Titanic but sailed three days earlier on which liner instead?
Lusitania
Lusitania: Marconi had paperwork to finish and preferred that ship's public stenographer, his daughter Degna recalled, so he sailed three days before Titanic left Southampton in April 1912.
Q 08Reginald Fessenden's reported Christmas Eve 1906 audio broadcast came from a station in which place?
Brant Rock, Massachusetts
Brant Rock, Massachusetts: Fessenden's station there used a General Electric alternator built under Ernst Alexanderson to carry voice; he had already sent speech about a mile by radio in 1900.
Q 09The SI unit of frequency, used to tune every radio dial, is named after which physicist?
Heinrich Hertz
Heinrich Hertz: in 1887 he generated and detected electromagnetic waves in his Karlsruhe laboratory, proving they could travel through the air; the hertz, one cycle per second, honours him.
Q 10Whose 1864 presentation first proposed that light and radio waves were both electromagnetic radiation?
James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell presented 'A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field' to the Royal Society in December 1864, predicting electromagnetic waves moving at light speed; Hertz confirmed them experimentally in 1887.
Q 11In which year did the US Supreme Court restore the priority of Tesla, Lodge and Stone's radio patents over Marconi's?
1943
1943: in Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America v. United States, decided on 21 June 1943, the Supreme Court held Marconi's tuning patent invalid because Lodge, Tesla and Stone had anticipated it.
Q 12What name did Lee de Forest give the three-element vacuum tube he developed around 1906-1908?
Audion
Audion: de Forest added a control grid to Fleming's two-element valve and patented the three-element tube in 1907; the triode became the first practical electronic amplifier, enabling broadcasting and long-distance telephony.
Q 13What was the inaugural program of Pittsburgh station KDKA on 2 November 1920?
Presidential election returns
Q 21Who was appointed the first general manager of the British Broadcasting Company in December 1922?
John Reith
John Reith, a Scottish engineer and son of a Free Church minister, took the post in December 1922 and set the mission to inform, educate and entertain that the BBC adopted.
Q 22On what date did the BBC become a public corporation under royal charter?
1 January 1927
1 January 1927: the British Broadcasting Company gave way to the British Broadcasting Corporation under royal charter, with the newly knighted John Reith as first director-general and the motto 'Nation shall speak peace unto Nation'.
Q 23During the 1926 General Strike, supporters of the strikers nicknamed the BBC what?
The station went on air under the temporary 'special amateur' call sign 8ZZ and did not broadcast daily until 1921.
Q 14Engineer Frank Conrad's experimental station 8XK inspired which company to launch KDKA?
Westinghouse
Westinghouse: its vice-president Harry P. Davis saw a September 1920 department-store advertisement selling receivers to hear Conrad's 8XK concerts and decided the company should run its own station, KDKA.
Q 15Titanic's wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride were on whose payroll?
The Marconi company
The Marconi company: Phillips and Bride were employees of the Marconi International Marine Communication Company, not White Star; their job was mostly sending passengers' paid 'marconigrams', with ice warnings in between.
Q 16Which distress call were Marconi's ship operators instructed to use from 1904, before SOS took hold?
CQD
CQD: a Marconi circular of January 1904 ordered its operators to send CQD for ships in distress; Jack Binns's CQD from the sinking liner Republic in 1909 helped bring rescue to about 1,500 people.
Q 17Which country was the first to adopt the SOS distress signal, in 1905?
Germany
Germany: German radio regulations effective 1 April 1905 introduced the SOS signal; the 1906 Berlin International Radiotelegraph Convention made it a worldwide standard from 1 July 1908.
Q 18Which Morse code pattern is the SOS distress signal?
Three dots, three dashes, three dots
SOS is sent as three dots, three dashes, three dots, run together as one continuous signal; it was chosen in 1905 for being unmistakable, not as an abbreviation of any phrase.
Q 19Interference that hampered Titanic's distress calls prompted which piece of US legislation?
The Radio Act of 1912
The Radio Act of 1912, signed that August, required federal licences for every transmitter and pushed amateurs below 200 metres so their chatter could not swamp ship distress traffic.
Q 20WEAF's first sponsored program in August 1922, often called the first radio commercial, promoted what?
Apartments in Queens
Apartments in Queens: the Queensboro Corporation paid for about ten minutes on WEAF on 28 August 1922 to pitch its Hawthorne Court apartments in Jackson Heights, closer to an infomercial than a jingle.
British Falsehood Company
With newspapers halted, the BBC suddenly became the nation's main news source, and Reith himself announced the strike's end by reciting Blake's 'Jerusalem'.
Q 24The 1988 Christmas Radio Times sold roughly how many copies, a British magazine record?
11 million
The exact tally was 11,220,666, certified by Guinness as the biggest-selling edition of any British magazine ever.
Q 25Which opera star sang two arias in Marconi's pioneering broadcast from Chelmsford on 15 June 1920?
Nellie Melba
Nellie Melba sang from the Marconi works at Chelmsford on 15 June 1920 in a concert sponsored by the Daily Mail; listeners reported hearing her across much of Europe.
Q 26Which American engineer developed FM radio and the superheterodyne receiver?
Edwin Armstrong
Edwin Armstrong patented the superheterodyne receiver in 1920 and demonstrated wide-band FM in 1935; he held 42 patents and let the US military use them free of charge during the Second World War.
Q 27Armstrong developed wide-band FM in secret in the basement of a building at which university?
Columbia
Columbia University: Armstrong worked in the basement laboratory of Philosophy Hall, where he had long been Michael Pupin's assistant, and was granted his core wide-band FM patents on 26 December 1933.
Q 28In 1948 Armstrong sued which corporation and its network NBC for infringing his FM patents?
RCA
RCA: Armstrong filed suit against RCA and NBC in July 1948 for infringing his FM patents; the case drained his fortune, and after his death in 1954 his widow Marion settled with RCA for about $1 million.
Q 29In which country was Armstrong serving in WWI when he developed the superheterodyne?
France
France: Armstrong was a US Army Signal Corps officer in Paris in 1918 when he devised the superheterodyne, which mixes the incoming signal with a locally generated one to produce a fixed intermediate frequency.
Q 30What does the 'AM' in AM radio stand for?
Amplitude modulation
Amplitude modulation varies the strength of a fixed-frequency carrier wave in step with the audio; it was the first method used for voice broadcasting and is the system of the medium-wave, longwave and shortwave bands.