Second Industrial Revolution
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50 free Second Industrial Revolution trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Between about 1870 and 1914, steel, petroleum, chemicals and electric power remade daily life faster than the first wave of steam and textiles ever had. Cities climbed upward and lit up at night, a letter that once took weeks could be answered in minutes, and a handful of businessmen grew richer than most governments. This quiz covers the whole story: the inventions and the people behind them, the industrialists and the tactics they used to crush rivals, and the impact on ordinary lives, from child labor and bitter strikes to mass immigration and the first laws written to rein in big business. It is pitched for students revising a history unit and for anyone who likes knowing where the modern world came from. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you guess wrong.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Whose wife Bertha took his three-wheeled Motorwagen on the first long-distance car journey in 1888 without telling him?
Karl Benz
Karl Benz's wife cleared a blocked fuel line with her hat pin on the 65-mile drive and bought more fuel at a pharmacy. She took their two teenage sons along for the ride.
Q 02What did US and Canadian railroads introduce on November 18, 1883, some 35 years before Congress made it law?
Standard time zones
Standard time zones began as a private railroad agreement, set off by a telegraph signal from an observatory in Pittsburgh. Congress only adopted them in the Standard Time Act of 1918.
Q 03Which invention did Elisha Gray and a teacher of the deaf both take to the US Patent Office on February 14, 1876?
Telephone
The telephone patent went to Alexander Graham Bell, whose lawyer filed on the same day that Gray's lodged a caveat with a similar diagram. Who reached the office first has been argued over ever since.
Q 04Which inventor's Pearl Street Station began selling electricity to 82 customers in Manhattan in 1882?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison's plant started with six dynamos and a load of just 400 lamps. Within two years it was lighting more than 10,000 for 508 customers.
Q 05Which carmaker's five-dollar daily wage of 1914 more than doubled the pay of most of his workers?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford wanted to end the heavy turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men a year to fill 100 jobs. The raise worked: Detroit's best mechanics flocked to his plant.
Q 06Which Swedish chemist patented dynamite three years after a nitroglycerin blast killed his younger brother Emil?
Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel made nitroglycerin safe enough to handle, and dynamite rapidly replaced black powder for blasting rock. The fortune it earned him now pays for the prizes that carry his name.
Q 07Which New York landmark with steel-wire cables was completed in 1883 under Emily Roebling's daily supervision?
Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge was first crossed by Emily Roebling herself, riding in a carriage with a rooster as a sign of victory. She had run the site for years after her engineer husband fell ill.
Q 08Which fuel was the oil industry's main product in the 1800s, decades before cars created a market for gasoline?
Kerosene
Kerosene gave homes a lamp oil cheaper than whale oil, and America's whaling fleet, more than 700 vessels strong in 1846, went into a long decline.
Q 09Which nickname for Gilded Age tycoons was borrowed from feudal lords along Germany's Rhine?
Robber barons
Robber barons were medieval German lords who charged illegal tolls on roads and along the Rhine. The label was already being thrown at American businessmen in The Atlantic Monthly by August 1870.
Q 10Which steel magnate argued in his 1889 essay 'The Gospel of Wealth' that the rich should give their surplus away?
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie did as he preached. In the last 18 years of his life he gave away around $350 million, almost 90 percent of his fortune.
Q 11Which company did the US Supreme Court order broken up in 1911, partly as a result of Ida Tarbell's reporting?
Standard Oil
Standard Oil's breakup actually propelled the personal wealth of its founder, John D. Rockefeller. Its largest fragment, Jersey Standard, later became ExxonMobil.
Q 12Which humorist's 1873 satirical novel, co-written with Charles Dudley Warner, gave the Gilded Age its name?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain and Warner were neighbors and good friends in Hartford, Connecticut. Their book satirized an era whose serious social problems were masked by a thin gold gilding of economic expansion.
Q 13Which pair honed their skills in a Dayton, Ohio bicycle shop before making the first powered flight in 1903?
Q 21Which camera brand did George Eastman launch in 1888 with a $25 box preloaded with film for 100 exposures?
Kodak
Kodak was a made-up word. Eastman, who thought K a strong, incisive sort of letter, devised the name with his mother using an Anagrams set.
Q 22Laborers from which country were barred from entering the United States by an 1882 act of Congress?
China
China's laborers were shut out by the first major US law to bar a whole national group. Meant to last ten years, the ban was renewed, made permanent in 1902 and repealed only in 1943.
Q 23Which city's ten-story Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885, is often cited as the world's first skyscraper?
Chicago
Chicago architect William Le Baron Jenney gave the building a weight-bearing metal frame, which is why it earns the title. It stood just 138 feet tall and was demolished in 1931.
Wright brothers
The Wright brothers flew near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17. Three days earlier Wilbur had won a coin toss for the first attempt and stalled on takeoff.
Q 14Which immigration station in New York Harbor processed about 12 million arrivals between 1892 and 1954?
Ellis Island
Ellis Island's first arrival was Annie Moore, a 17-year-old from Cork, Ireland, travelling with her two brothers to meet their parents. By one estimate, two-fifths of Americans descend from people processed there.
Q 15Which waterway formally opened on August 15, 1914, when the cargo ship SS Ancon made the first official transit?
Panama Canal
The Panama Canal succeeded where a French attempt had gone bankrupt in 1889. An estimated 22,000 men died from disease and accidents during that first effort.
Q 16Which Serbian-American engineer's induction motor patents of 1888 became the cornerstone of alternating-current power?
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla had migrated to the United States only four years before, in 1884. Licensing the patents earned him a considerable amount of money.
Q 17Which centrepiece of an 1889 world's fair was the world's tallest structure until the Chrysler Building rose?
Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower held the height record for 41 years. Locals nicknamed it the Iron Lady for the 7,300 tonnes of wrought iron in its frame.
Q 18Which production method began at Michigan's Highland Park plant in 1913 and cut a Model T's build time to 93 minutes?
Moving assembly line
The moving assembly line split the car's construction into 45 steps and carried the work past the workers on conveyor belts. The same job had previously taken 12.5 man-hours.
Q 19Which Italian inventor reported hearing the Morse letter S sent 2,200 miles across the Atlantic in December 1901?
Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Marconi caught the signal in Newfoundland on an antenna held up by a kite. Storms had damaged the equipment at the receiving station he first planned on Cape Cod.
Q 20Which painkiller did the dye maker Bayer launch under a trademarked name in 1899?
Aspirin
Aspirin is a chemical relative of salicin from willow bark, a remedy used for at least 2,400 years. A Bayer chemist first produced it in a pure, stable form in 1897.
Q 24In which industry did 'breaker boys' aged 8 to 12 pick slate from the product by hand for ten hours a day?
Coal mining
Coal mining companies made breaker boys work without gloves so they could grip the slick lumps. The sharp slate often left their fingers cut and bleeding.
Q 25Which waterfall drove the Adams Power Plant of 1895, the world's first large-scale alternating-current station?
Niagara Falls
Niagara Falls power was soon carried on by transmission lines to the city of Buffalo. The plant showed that electricity could be generated far from the factories and homes that used it.
Q 26Which engine inventor, born in Paris to Bavarian parents, vanished from a steamer bound for England in 1913?
Rudolf Diesel
Rudolf Diesel retired to his cabin at about 10 p.m. and was never seen alive again. In the morning his bed had not been slept in, though his nightshirt was neatly laid out.
Q 27Which financier pledged his own money and pressed fellow New York bankers to do likewise to halt the Panic of 1907?
J. P. Morgan
J. P. Morgan turned the library of his Madison Avenue brownstone into a revolving door of bank presidents. The scare led Congress to create the Federal Reserve in 1913.
Q 28Which commodity's forced collection in Leopold II's Congo Free State was exposed by consul Roger Casement's report?
Rubber
Rubber was suddenly wanted everywhere after the inflatable tyre set off a worldwide boom in the 1890s. Workers who refused to collect it could be killed and entire villages razed.
Q 29Which English inventor, seeking cheaper steel for guns, devised a converter that blew air through molten pig iron?
Henry Bessemer
Henry Bessemer announced it in an 1856 paper on making iron and steel 'without Fuel', which The Times printed in full. Oxygen in the air blast burns off the impurities.
Q 30Which railway air brake inventor's company won the contract to light the 1893 Columbian Exposition with AC power?
George Westinghouse
George Westinghouse had founded his air brake company back in 1869. His bid beat General Electric's, and the fair became a showcase for alternating current.