The 1830s
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50 free The 1830s trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The 1830s were the decade when the modern world began to click into place. Steam railways started carrying passengers between cities, a teenage Victoria came to the British throne, and Andrew Jackson dominated American politics while Texas fought its way out of Mexico. This quiz covers the names people still remember from the decade and the stories behind them: presidents and monarchs, inventors and novelists, rebels and reformers. It also collects the fun facts, including newspaper hoaxes, accidental discoveries, oddly named wars and the first appearance of words we still use every day. It suits history fans, students of the period, and anyone researching or writing about the era who wants to know who and what belonged to it. The questions run from easy to tough, and each answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animal, pulling a rival carriage, outran the steam locomotive Tom Thumb in a famous 1830 race?
A horse
A horse won only because a belt slipped off the engine's blower and it lost power. The railroad was convinced anyway and dropped its animals for locomotives the next year.
Q 02Which London residence did Queen Victoria become the first monarch to live in on taking the throne in 1837?
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace was being rebuilt for George IV, who died before it was finished, so the 18-year-old Victoria was the first sovereign to move in.
Q 03What saved President Andrew Jackson when a house painter tried to shoot him at the US Capitol in 1835?
Both pistols misfired
Both pistols misfired, and the 67-year-old Jackson then set about the gunman with his cane. It was the first known attempt to kill a sitting US president.
Q 04Which heavenly body did New York's Sun newspaper claim in 1835 was home to unicorns and bat-winged people?
The Moon
The Moon was the setting of six hoax articles that falsely credited the real astronomer Sir John Herschel with spotting bison, two-legged beavers and temples through a giant telescope.
Q 05Which everyday abbreviation first appeared in print in 1839 during a Boston fad for comic misspellings?
OK
OK is traced by most reference works to a jokey shortening of a misspelled "all correct". It caught on nationally a year later as a slogan in the 1840 presidential election.
Q 06Which former Tennessee congressman, famous as a frontiersman, was killed defending the Alamo in Texas in 1836?
Davy Crockett
Davy Crockett narrowly lost his seat in Congress in 1835 and left angrily for Texas, where he died at the Alamo only months later.
Q 07Which Royal Navy survey ship carried the naturalist Charles Darwin around the world between 1831 and 1836?
HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle was supposed to be away for two years and stayed out almost five, and Darwin spent most of that time exploring on land.
Q 08Which Native American nation was forced west from Georgia in 1838 along the Trail of Tears?
Cherokee
Cherokee families were driven out after gold was found near their Georgia land, and about 4,000 of them died on the journey to what is now Oklahoma.
Q 09Which Charles Dickens novel about a workhouse orphan began appearing in monthly magazine instalments in 1837?
Oliver Twist
Oliver Twist was a satire aimed at the harsh new Poor Laws, and it gave English the pickpocket nicknamed the Artful Dodger.
Q 10Which veteran campaigner died three days after learning that Britain's 1833 bill to end slavery would pass?
William Wilberforce
William Wilberforce lived just long enough to hear the news. The act's £20 million in compensation went to slave owners, while those freed had to serve on as unpaid apprentices.
Q 11Which invention did France buy from Louis Daguerre in 1839 and present as a gift free to the world?
Photography
Photography in its first practical form, the daguerreotype, was handed over in exchange for lifetime pensions for Daguerre and his late partner's son.
Q 12Which American portrait painter turned inventor first publicly demonstrated his electric telegraph in 1838?
Samuel Morse
Samuel Morse was turned down for federal funding that same year, and his famous first long-distance message did not go out until 1844.
Q 13Which enslaved preacher led an 1831 uprising in Virginia after reading a solar eclipse as a divine sign?
Nat Turner
Q 21Which Japanese artist, by then in his seventies, created the woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1831?
Hokusai
Hokusai made it the first of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, a series whose Prussian blue pigment revolutionised Japanese prints.
Q 22Which French novelist published the tale of the bell-ringer Quasimodo and the dancer Esmeralda in 1831?
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo saw the novel as a plea to preserve France's Gothic architecture, and was reportedly upset when its English title put the hunchback first.
Q 23Which writer's first fairy-tale booklet, published in Copenhagen in 1835, included The Princess and the Pea?
Hans Christian Andersen
Nat Turner led the deadliest slave revolt in US history, and Southern legislatures answered it with laws banning the education of enslaved people.
Q 14Which country broke from the Netherlands after an 1830 revolt that began with a riot outside an opera house?
Belgium
Belgium's revolt began when Brussels theatregoers left a patriotic opera and joined the mob outside. The new country installed Leopold I as its first king in 1831.
Q 15Which former governor of Tennessee won at San Jacinto and became first president of the Republic of Texas?
Sam Houston
Sam Houston remains the only person ever elected governor of two different US states: Tennessee first, and Texas after it joined the Union.
Q 16Which locomotive fatally ran over MP William Huskisson when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830?
Rocket
Rocket hit him after dozens of dignitaries climbed down onto the tracks during a stop. Huskisson is remembered as the first widely reported railway passenger casualty.
Q 17Which material did Charles Goodyear toughen in 1839 by heating it with sulfur over a hot stove?
Rubber
Rubber goods had been turning sticky and rotting until Goodyear's discovery, a process later named vulcanization after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.
Q 18Which American inventor patented his revolving handgun in 1836, an idea he said came from a ship's capstan?
Samuel Colt
Samuel Colt dreamed it up at sea on a voyage to Calcutta, then opened his first gun works in Paterson, New Jersey.
Q 19Which Illinois blacksmith built a successful steel plow in 1837 and gave his name to a tractor maker?
John Deere
John Deere, a Vermont-born craftsman, polished the steel so highly that the sticky prairie clay slid off it, where cast-iron plows had struggled.
Q 20Which self-taught English physicist discovered electromagnetic induction, the effect behind generators, in 1831?
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday had little formal schooling and started out at 14 as a bookbinder's apprentice, educating himself from the books in the shop.
Hans Christian Andersen issued the tales in thin unbound booklets, and by 1837 the third one had added The Little Mermaid and The Emperor's New Clothes.
Q 24Which commodity did Chinese official Lin Zexu seize from foreign traders and destroy in 1839, starting a war?
Opium
Opium was destroyed in public on Humen Beach, after the emperor rejected proposals to legalise and tax the trade instead.
Q 25Which American author was born in 1835, two weeks after Halley's Comet's closest approach, and died as it returned?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain predicted in 1909 that he would go out with the comet, and he died of a heart attack the day after it passed closest to the Sun.
Q 26Which American published the Book of Mormon in 1830, saying he had translated it from buried golden plates?
Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith said an angel named Moroni had told him the plates lay buried in a hill near his home in upstate New York.
Q 27Which London landmark burned down in 1834 after old wooden tally sticks were carelessly burned in its furnaces?
Houses of Parliament
Houses of Parliament furnaces were stuffed with obsolete Exchequer accounting sticks, starting a chimney fire that spared little beyond the medieval Westminster Hall.
Q 28Which Thames crossing, opened in 1831, was sold in 1968 and rebuilt in Lake Havasu City, Arizona?
London Bridge
London Bridge, a five-arch granite design by John Rennie, was bought by an American entrepreneur, and its numbered facing stones were shipped out through the Panama Canal.
Q 29Which future abolitionist orator escaped slavery in Maryland in 1838 by boarding a train dressed as a sailor?
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass carried papers borrowed from a free Black seaman and reached New York, where days later he married the woman who had helped pay for the journey.
Q 30Which Pacific archipelago's mockingbirds and giant tortoises did Charles Darwin study on his 1835 visit?
Galápagos Islands
Galápagos Islands mockingbirds differed from one island to the next, as Darwin happened to notice, and from then on he recorded where each mockingbird was caught.