Thomas Edison Trivia
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48 free Thomas Edison trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, built the world's first industrial research laboratory, gave the world the phonograph and a practical light bulb, lit lower Manhattan from Pearl Street, and lost the war of the currents to Westinghouse anyway. He also ran an iron mine into the ground, poured concrete houses, chased rubber in goldenrod and had his dying breath sealed in a test tube. This quiz covers the inventor, the businessman and the difficult man. Easy questions ask where his famous lab was, what he invented in 1877 and who took over his company. Harder ones want the invention behind his first patent, the newspaper he printed on a train as a teenager, the filament that finally lasted 1,200 hours, the voltage he chose for America, the elephant his studio filmed, the plant that gave him 12 percent latex and the president who asked the nation to switch off its lights when he died. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Thomas Edison, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Written for history and science teachers, inventors and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Inventions, Famous Physicists and Nikola Tesla.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many US patents did Thomas Edison register?
1,093
1,093. That is a patent every ten to twelve days of his adult life; he had once vowed to turn out "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so".
Q 02In which Ohio town was Edison born in 1847?
Milan
Milan. His father had fled there from Canada after joining a failed rebellion, and moved the family on to Port Huron, Michigan, when Edison was seven.
Q 03Edison was nicknamed "The Wizard of" which New Jersey village, home to his laboratory?
Menlo Park
Menlo Park. He bought land there after a Newark landlord sued him, and his father oversaw the building of what became known as his "invention factory".
Q 04Which invention first brought Edison wide public notice in 1877?
The phonograph
The phonograph. He was only trying to record telephone messages so that they could be written down, then realised his machine could capture sound itself.
Q 05Historian Paul Israel blames Edison's deafness on ear infections plus which childhood illness?
Scarlet fever
Scarlet fever. Edison told a taller tale, that he had once been hauled up by his ears, and came to call his deafness a help to concentration.
Q 06Where did the teenage Edison write, print and sell his own newspaper, the Herald?
Aboard a moving train
Aboard a moving train. He kept a printing press in the baggage car beside his chemistry bench, until an accidental fire put an end to his experiments on board.
Q 07What ended Edison's night job as a telegrapher at Stratford Junction, Ontario?
A near collision of two trains
A near collision of two trains. By his own account he failed to stop a freight in time; summoned before the general manager in Toronto, he slipped out mid-hearing and fled to Michigan.
Q 08What was Edison's first patent, granted on June 1, 1869, for?
An electric vote recorder
An electric vote recorder. Legislators had no wish to buy a machine that sped up their votes, and Edison resolved never again to invent something nobody wanted.
Q 09What could Edison's quadruplex telegraph of 1874 do?
Send four messages at once on one wire
Send four messages at once on one wire, two in each direction. Western Union had backed the work, but Edison sold the rights to its bitter rival, and years of lawsuits followed.
Q 10Edison's only enrolment in higher education appears to have been a chemistry course at which Manhattan institution?
The Cooper Union
The Cooper Union. In 1872 he and assistant Charles Batchelor were trying to record telegraph signals on chemically treated paper, and neither man knew much chemistry.
Q 11Which telephone part did Edison perfect using a material whose electrical resistance changed with the pressure of sound?
The carbon microphone
The carbon microphone. Carbon's jumpy resistance had ruined one of his telegraph instruments; in a telephone it was just what he needed, and his transmitter stayed in use for nearly a century.
Q 12Edison, who resented being called a wizard, said genius was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent what?
Perspiration
Perspiration. When a colleague praised his genius, Edison retorted that genius was just "hard work, stick-to-it-iveness, and common sense".
Q 13In 1878 Edison went west to Wyoming to point his heat-detecting tasimeter at which celestial event?
Q 21Whose alternating current beat Edison's direct current in the 'war of the currents'?
George Westinghouse
George Westinghouse. His alternating current could be sent long distances over thin, cheap wires, while Edison's direct current reached barely a mile from the power station.
Q 22Why did Edison back an alternating-current electric chair?
To smear a rival's system
To smear a rival's system. Edison opposed capital punishment, yet his ally Harold P. Brown killed dogs with alternating current before audiences and secretly obtained rival-built generators for the first chair.
Q 23The 1892 merger of Edison's lighting company with its rival Thomson-Houston created which industrial giant?
A total solar eclipse
A total solar eclipse. Astronomers wanted to know whether the Sun's faint corona gave off measurable heat, so Edison built them a detector and joined the expedition himself.
Q 14Which filament material did Edison and Batchelor discover could last over 1,200 hours in a light bulb?
Carbonized bamboo
Carbonized bamboo. Edison spotted the bamboo rim of a palm-leaf fan lying in the laboratory, had strips of it carbonized and tested, then sent a man to Japan to find more.
Q 15Edison gave his first two children which pair of nicknames?
Dot and Dash
Dot and Dash. Marion and Thomas Jr. got the pet names; their mother fared worse in his laboratory notebook, where the newly-wed Edison grumbled that she "cannot invent worth a damn".
Q 16Which financier's firm helped Edison form the Edison Electric Light Company in New York?
J.P. Morgan & Co.
J.P. Morgan & Co., then trading as Drexel, Morgan. The backers, Vanderbilts among them, put up their money in 1878, a full year before Edison had a lamp that would stay lit.
Q 17On which night in 1879 did special trains bring thousands to see Edison's laboratory lit by his electric lamps?
New Year's Eve
New Year's Eve. More than three thousand people came, after a full-page New York Herald report on the lamp stirred up such excitement that Edison felt obliged to put on a public show.
Q 18Which British inventor merged his rival light-bulb firm with Edison's?
Joseph Swan
Joseph Swan. He held a British patent on a similar lamp, so instead of fighting him in court Edison joined forces, and the pair sold their bulbs under the blended name Ediswan.
Q 19Edison's first commercial power station in America, switched on in 1882, stood on which Manhattan street?
Pearl Street
Pearl Street. Edison picked the financial district on purpose, within reach of bankers and two newspapers, and began with only a few hundred lamps.
Q 20Months before his famous American plant, Edison switched on a steam-driven public power station in which European city?
London
London. The Holborn Viaduct station lit nearly a thousand street lamps but ran at a heavy loss; it closed in 1886 and the street went back to gas.
General Electric
General Electric. The deal backfired on Edison's side: the financiers rated the rival more highly, put its board in charge, and the Edison name vanished from the title.
Q 24What did Edison's near-ruinous ore-milling venture try to extract from low-grade rock and sand?
Iron
Iron. He sank some $2.5 million of his own money before cheap Lake Superior ore killed the scheme, then shrugged: "It's all gone, but we had a hell of a good time spending it."
Q 25What did Edison plan to mass-produce by pouring his cement into a single giant mould?
A whole three-storey house
A whole three-storey house. He dreamed of filling them with concrete furniture, refrigerators and even pianos, but builders never took to the idea and the scheme was dropped.
Q 26Edison gave up work on which new technology in 1903, saying he was afraid of it, after it maimed his assistant?
X-rays
X-rays. Clarence Dally, who had tested the laboratory's fluoroscope on his own hands, lost both arms to radiation burns and died the following year, aged 39.
Q 27Which chemistry did Edison settle on for the rechargeable battery he designed to power electric cars?
Nickel–iron
Nickel–iron. The first cells leaked and lost their charge, so Edison recalled them and halted production in 1904, then spent about five more years getting the battery right.
Q 28Which future carmaker met Edison in 1896 while working for the Edison Illuminating Company?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford. Edison urged the young engineer to keep tinkering with his petrol car, and a grateful Ford later rebuilt his hero's old laboratory as a museum in Michigan.
Q 29William Kennedy Laurie Dickson did most of the real work on which invention credited to Edison?
The movie camera
The movie camera. Edison handled the electrical side while Dickson led the work on optics and film, then left in 1895 and helped to found a rival film company.
Q 30What was the Kinetoscope, which Edison built in 1891?
A peep-hole film viewer for penny arcades
A peep-hole film viewer for penny arcades. Edison saw more profit in one-customer machines than in projection, until rivals' big-screen shows forced him to buy in a projector and sell it as his own.