This radio trivia quiz has 100 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 100 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
Storms had wrecked his planned Cape Cod receiving site, and the letter 'S' he heard was never automatically recorded, so historians still debate it.
Q 03Roughly how long was the kite-supported receiving antenna Marconi used for his 1901 transatlantic test?
500 feet
The transmitting station at Poldhu in Cornwall did the heavy lifting; the kite simply hoisted a wire into the Newfoundland sky.
Q 04Marconi's mother Annie was the granddaughter of the founder of which famous drinks company?
Jameson whiskey
That Irish connection later helped Marconi find backers in Britain when Italy showed little interest in his experiments.
Q 05Marconi was born in 1874 in which Italian city?
Bologna
He never received formal schooling; private tutors taught him at home, and a professor at the local university let him use its lab.
Q 06At the hour of Marconi's funeral in 1937, radio transmitters around the world fell silent for how long?
Two minutes
Shops on his Rome street closed 'for national mourning', and the British Post Office asked every broadcasting ship to join the hush.
Q 07Marconi was offered free passage on the Titanic but sailed three days earlier on which liner instead?
Lusitania
His daughter said he had paperwork to finish and preferred the public stenographer on the other ship.
Q 08Reginald Fessenden's reported Christmas Eve 1906 audio broadcast came from a station in which place?
Brant Rock, Massachusetts
Fessenden had already sent speech about a mile by radio in 1900, and used an alternator that spun out a 50,000 Hz carrier.
Q 09The SI unit of frequency, used to tune every radio dial, is named after which physicist?
Heinrich Hertz
He proved in the 1880s that Maxwell's predicted electromagnetic waves could actually be sent through the air.
Q 10Whose 1864 presentation first proposed that light and radio waves were both electromagnetic radiation?
James Clerk Maxwell
The theory sat unproven for two decades until Hertz's laboratory experiments confirmed it.
Q 11In which year did the US Supreme Court restore the priority of Tesla, Lodge and Stone's radio patents over Marconi's?
1943
The court stressed it was not ruling on who first transmitted by radio, only that Marconi's company could not sue over improvements it had not originated.
Q 12What name did Lee de Forest give the three-element vacuum tube he developed around 1906-1908?
Audion
It was the first device that could amplify an electrical signal, which made broadcasting and long-distance telephone lines practical.
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
A Scottish Calvinist, he set the 'inform, educate and entertain' directive the BBC still cites today.
Q 22On what date did the BBC become a public corporation under royal charter?
1 January 1927
The newly knighted Reith became its first director general, and the corporation adopted the motto 'Nation shall speak peace unto Nation'.
Q 23During the 1926 General Strike, supporters of the strikers nicknamed the BBC what?
British Falsehood Company
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
Conrad got into radio in 1913 after a bet over whose watch was more accurate, and built a receiver to check the time signals.
Q 15Titanic's wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride were on whose payroll?
The Marconi company
Their day job was mostly sending passengers' 'marconigrams', with weather and ice warnings squeezed in between.
Q 16Which distress call were Marconi's ship operators instructed to use from 1904, before SOS took hold?
CQD
The 1909 rescue of the liner Republic, whose operator repeated that call, saved more than 1,500 people and proved the value of shipboard wireless.
Q 17Which country was the first to adopt the SOS distress signal, in 1905?
Germany
It became a worldwide standard after the 1906 Berlin radiotelegraph convention, taking effect in 1908.
Q 18What did the letters SOS originally stand for?
It was not an abbreviation
The signal was just a memorable Morse pattern of three dots, three dashes, three dots; the backronyms came later.
Q 19Interference that hampered Titanic's distress calls prompted which piece of US legislation?
The Radio Act of 1912
The law separated ordinary chatter from maritime emergency traffic and spelled out the government's role in a crisis.
Q 20WEAF's first sponsored program in August 1922, often called the first radio commercial, promoted what?
Apartments in Queens
It ran about ten minutes and pitched homes in Jackson Heights near a new elevated subway line, closer to an infomercial than a jingle.
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
The Daily Mail sponsored the concert, and reports claimed her trill was picked up as far away as New York.
Q 26Which American engineer developed FM radio and the superheterodyne receiver?
Edwin Armstrong
He held 42 patents and gave the US military free use of them during both world wars.
Q 27Armstrong developed wide-band FM in secret in the basement of a building at which university?
Columbia
He was granted five US patents covering the system on 26 December 1933 and later took a professorship there.
Q 28In 1948 Armstrong sued which corporation and its network NBC for infringing his FM patents?
RCA
The litigation dragged on for years and drained his fortune; the suits were only settled after his death in 1954.
Q 29In which country was Armstrong serving in WWI when he developed the superheterodyne?
France
The circuit mixes the incoming signal with a locally generated one, and it still sits inside almost every receiver made today.
Q 30What does the 'AM' in AM radio stand for?
Amplitude modulation
It was the first method developed for sending audio by radio and is still used on the medium-wave, longwave and shortwave bands.