Science and Technology Trivia
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100 free Science and Technology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Science and technology is the round that decides most pub quizzes, because everyone knows the headline facts and almost nobody knows the layer underneath: what the first commercial microwave oven was called, which plant Edison's filaments came from, what the first webcam was pointed at, or who really reversed the Celsius scale. These 100 questions go one layer down on each corner of the category. Inventors and the patents they sold for almost nothing, the early internet and the first worm that crawled it, the hardware that found the radiation belts and fixed Hubble's mirror, the gadgets that won format wars, the scientists behind the units and elements, the particles that took decades to catch, and the medical firsts from cloning to artificial hearts. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds something the textbook left out. Play it to find out how deep your general knowledge really goes, or print it for a quiz night round that will separate the table that knows from the table that guesses.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which singer's name went to the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, a Scottish sheep born in 1996?
Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton got the honour because the clone grew from a mammary gland cell, as the Roslin Institute team cheerfully admitted. The lamb was born on 5 July 1996 in Midlothian.
Q 02Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century king, whose runic initials make up the Bluetooth logo, of which country?
Denmark
Denmark's King Harald Bluetooth united its squabbling tribes into one kingdom, so Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the name in 1997 to suggest uniting rival wireless protocols.
Q 03Which item was eBay's first sale in 1995, going for $14.83 to a buyer who collected that kind of thing?
A broken laser pointer
A broken laser pointer went to a bidder who told founder Pierre Omidyar 'I'm a collector of broken laser pointers', settling his worry that the buyer had misread the listing.
Q 04The world's first webcam, set up at the University of Cambridge in 1991, kept watch over what?
A coffee pot
A coffee pot in the Trojan Room was filmed so people elsewhere in the building would not trek over to find it empty; the pot later fetched £3,350 at auction.
Q 05Which two-word greeting was the first SMS, sent from a computer to a Vodafone phone in December 1992?
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas was typed on a computer by 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth on 3 December 1992 and reached Vodafone director Richard Jarvis's Orbitel 901 while he was at his office Christmas party.
Q 06Which puzzle game came bundled with the Game Boy when it reached North America in 1989?
Tetris
Tetris became the pack-in after Henk Rogers told Nintendo of America's Minoru Arakawa that a Mario game would sell the Game Boy to young boys, but this one would sell it to everyone.
Q 07Which Swedish botanist is credited with flipping Anders Celsius's scale, which first put boiling at 0 and freezing at 100?
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus had a thermometer built for his Uppsala greenhouses with the scale the modern way up, and his December 1745 report is the first known Swedish record of it.
Q 08Which Hollywood actress co-patented a frequency-hopping guidance system for torpedoes in 1942?
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr worked it out with composer George Antheil, borrowing the synchronised rolls of a player piano to make the transmitter and torpedo switch frequencies in step.
Q 09At which company did Steven Sasson build the first digital camera in 1975, saving each shot to cassette tape?
Kodak
Kodak sat on the 100-by-100-pixel prototype, which weighed 8 pounds and took 23 seconds to write each image, and did not disclose it publicly until 2000.
Q 10Which nursery rhyme did Thomas Edison recite into his tinfoil phonograph in 1877 as its first test?
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Mary Had a Little Lamb, recited onto a tinfoil cylinder, counts as the first recorded verse, though that 1877 recording was never preserved and a 1927 re-enactment is often mistaken for it.
Q 11Which 1979 Sony cassette player grew from co-founder Masaru Ibuka's wish for music on business trips?
Walkman
Walkman was judged such bad English that early exports went out as the Sound-about in the US and the Stowaway in Britain before the Japanese name won everywhere.
Q 12Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk in 1973 for which company?
Motorola
Motorola's Cooper dialled his rival Joel Engel at AT&T and told him he was calling from 'a real handheld portable cell phone', a 2.5-pound DynaTAC that was later dubbed 'the brick'.
Q 13Which Japanese company created VHS, the videotape format that beat Sony's Betamax by recording for longer?
JVC
JVC, then a Matsushita subsidiary, launched VHS in 1976, a year after Betamax, and Matsushita backed it because it saw Betamax's one-hour recording limit as a weakness.
Q 21Who discovered rubber vulcanisation in 1839 when a sulfur mix hit a hot stove, yet died $200,000 in debt?
Charles Goodyear
Charles Goodyear had no part in the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company: Frank Seiberling founded it in 1898, almost four decades after his death, and named it in his honour.
Q 22Which Czech playwright's 1920 drama R.U.R. gave English the word 'robot', from a term for forced labour?
Karel Čapek
Karel Čapek later credited his brother Josef, a painter, with coining the word, adapted from robota, the labour serfs owed their masters.
Q 23Walter Hunt twisted which fastener from brass wire in 1849 to clear a $15 debt, selling its patent for $400?
The safety pin
Q 14Bitcoin's creator published its white paper in 2008 under which pseudonym?
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto embedded a Times headline about a second bank bailout in Bitcoin's first block in January 2009, and the name's real owner has never been publicly confirmed.
Q 15The word 'wiki', which Ward Cunningham took from a Honolulu airport shuttle bus in 1995, is Hawaiian for what?
Quick
Quick is the meaning: Cunningham recalled the Wiki Wiki Shuttle between Honolulu airport's terminals and chose 'wiki-wiki' so he would not have to call his site 'quick-web'.
Q 16Masahiro Hara of Denso Wave invented the QR code in Japan in 1994 to keep track of what?
Car parts
Car parts at Denso's factories needed a label that held far more than a barcode, and Hara's square pattern was inspired by the black and white stones on a Go board.
Q 17Which ship took Charles Darwin on a survey voyage, billed as two years, that lasted almost five from 1831?
HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle's captain Robert FitzRoy wanted someone aboard to investigate geology, and the 22-year-old Darwin, planning to become a parson, took the berth and saw the Galápagos.
Q 18Albert Einstein was a clerk in which Swiss city's patent office when he published special relativity in 1905?
Bern
Bern's patent office took Einstein on after he had spent almost two years failing to land a teaching post, and he wrote the papers of his 1905 'miracle year' there in his spare time.
Q 19Which 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim beside two elephants was the first video uploaded to YouTube in 2005?
Me at the zoo
Me at the zoo was shot at the San Diego Zoo by Karim's high-school friend Yakov Lapitsky and went up on 23 April 2005, with Karim remarking on the length of the elephants' trunks.
Q 20Which DuPont fibre was first sold in 1938 as toothbrush bristles, two years before its famous stockings?
Nylon
Nylon stockings sold 64 million pairs in their first year, 1940, and post-war shortages sparked 'nylon riots', with 40,000 people queueing in Pittsburgh for 13,000 pairs.
The safety pin came from a man who had built a lockstitch sewing machine in the 1830s but never patented it, fearing it would throw seamstresses out of work.
Q 24Which plant, carbonised into a filament, let Thomas Edison's early light bulbs burn for more than 1,200 hours?
Bamboo
Bamboo from Japan replaced the filament of Edison's first successful test, on 22 October 1879, which had glowed for only 13.5 hours.
Q 25Which science-fiction author proposed geostationary communication satellites in a 1945 Wireless World article?
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke's October 1945 paper 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays' is why the geostationary orbit is sometimes called the Clarke orbit or Clarke belt.
Q 26Which AT&T satellite relayed the first live transatlantic TV in 1962 and named a chart-topping instrumental?
Telstar 1
Telstar 1 went up on 10 July 1962, and the Tornados' tune named after it became the first US number one single by a British group.
Q 27America's first satellite, launched in 1958, carried James Van Allen's cosmic-ray detector and was called what?
Explorer 1
Explorer 1 was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and flown on a Juno I rocket four months after Sputnik, and the belts it found now carry Van Allen's name.
Q 28Hubble's primary mirror was polished too flat at the edge by 2,200 nanometres, causing which optical flaw?
Spherical aberration
Spherical aberration makes light from a mirror's edge focus at a different point from its centre; the 1993 servicing mission installed COSTAR's corrective optics to fix it.
Q 29The James Webb Space Telescope's 18 hexagonal, gold-plated mirror segments are made of which metal?
Beryllium
Beryllium stays stiff and stable at the telescope's cryogenic operating temperatures, and the segments together form a 6.5-metre mirror parked at the Sun–Earth L2 point.
Q 30Which NASA rover was lowered into Gale crater from a rocket-powered 'sky crane' in 2012?
Curiosity
Curiosity was too heavy for the airbags that cushioned earlier rovers' landings, so its descent stage lowered it on cables and then flew clear.