World's Fairs Trivia
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50 free World's Fairs trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This world's fairs trivia quiz runs from the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London's Crystal Palace to the Osaka Expo of 2025. The easy questions are ones most people can reason out: the tower built as the entrance arch to the 1889 Paris fair, the ride invented to rival it in Chicago in 1893, the Seattle landmark left behind by the 1962 fair, the giant steel globe in Queens and the nine-sphere iron molecule that still stands in Brussels. The harder end is for history and architecture buffs: the fair that hosted the first American Olympics, the codename-style themes of the New York fairs, the exposition where Bell showed his telephone beside the Statue of Liberty's arm, the modular housing block Moshe Safdie built for Montreal, the Tower of the Sun in Osaka, the only world's fair to go bankrupt while open, the record 73 million visitors of Shanghai 2010, and the Paris body that has sanctioned expos since 1928. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for each exposition and its landmarks before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Eiffel Tower, Inventions and State Fair quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which part of London was the Great Exhibition of 1851 held?
Hyde Park
Hyde Park. The organisers wanted a hall that could be taken apart afterwards, so the Crystal Palace was built from prefabricated iron and glass and later rebuilt elsewhere in London.
Q 02Who designed the Crystal Palace that housed the Great Exhibition?
Joseph Paxton
Joseph Paxton made his name as a gardener. He scaled up the glasshouses he had built for the Duke of Devonshire, and his plan replaced a clumsier design the organisers had already accepted.
Q 03Which royal is credited with the idea for the 1851 Great Exhibition?
Prince Albert
Prince Albert. The profit from his exhibition bought land in South Kensington, where the Victoria and Albert, Science and Natural History museums were later built.
Q 04Which famous diamond, presented to Queen Victoria a year earlier, drew crowds at the 1851 Great Exhibition?
Koh-i-Noor
Koh-i-Noor. Visitors found the stone disappointingly dull, so it was recut the following year to add sparkle, which left it far lighter.
Q 05Where was the Crystal Palace re-erected after the 1851 exhibition closed?
Sydenham
Sydenham. The rebuilt palace staged concerts, shows and the FA Cup final before a fire destroyed it in 1936.
Q 06Which city staged one of Europe's first industrial exhibitions, in 1791, for a Bohemian coronation?
Prague
Prague. The show in the Clementinum marked Leopold II's coronation as king of Bohemia, the same occasion for which Mozart wrote his opera La clemenza di Tito.
Q 07Which centenary did the Paris world's fair that unveiled the Eiffel Tower celebrate?
The storming of the Bastille
The storming of the Bastille. Because the fair honoured a revolution, many of Europe's monarchies declined to take part officially.
Q 08What new role saved the Eiffel Tower from demolition when its 20-year permit expired?
Radio antenna
Radio antenna. Gustave Eiffel paid for wireless experiments from the top, and the tower proved so useful for military signals that the city renewed his permit.
Q 09Which French writer is said to have lunched at the Eiffel Tower because it was the one place he couldn't see it?
Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant. He had signed the 1887 artists' protest that called the planned tower useless and monstrous, alongside the composer Charles Gounod.
Q 10Which Picasso painting was first shown at the Spanish pavilion of the 1937 Paris world's fair?
Guernica
Guernica. Picasso had been asked for a mural for the pavilion, and the bombing of the Basque town that April, during Spain's civil war, gave him his subject.
Q 11What nickname did the 1893 Chicago fairgrounds get from its pale neoclassical buildings?
The White City
The White City. Its marble-like palaces were temporary shells: the fronts were plaster mixed with cement and jute fibre, painted white.
Q 12Which ride debuted at the 1893 Chicago fair as an answer to the Eiffel Tower?
The Ferris wheel
The Ferris wheel. George Ferris's giant wheel was a hit in Chicago, but it lost money afterwards, was moved to the 1904 St. Louis fair and was finally blown up with dynamite in 1906.
Q 13Which US president was shot while greeting visitors at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo?
William McKinley
Q 21Which treat is the 1904 St. Louis world's fair best known for popularising?
The ice cream cone
The ice cream cone. In the best-known story, waffle seller Ernest Hamwi rolled his pastry into a holder when the ice cream stand beside him ran out of dishes, though cone moulds had been patented earlier.
Q 22Which anniversary did the 1904 St. Louis exposition commemorate?
The Louisiana Purchase
The Louisiana Purchase. The fair opened a year after the 1903 centenary, and it inspired the song and film Meet Me in St. Louis.
Q 23Which Paris structures built for the 1900 Exposition Universelle still stand?
The Grand Palais and Petit Palais
William McKinley. An anarchist shot him as he shook hands in the fair's Temple of Music, and his death eight days later made Theodore Roosevelt president.
Q 14Which electrical system triumphed by lighting the 1893 Chicago fair?
Westinghouse's alternating current
Westinghouse's alternating current. Westinghouse won the contract by underbidding General Electric, and the generators it showed in Chicago became the basic tools of the power industry.
Q 15Which technology did RCA introduce to the American public at the 1939 New York World's Fair?
Television
Television. RCA's network NBC began regular broadcasts with the fair's opening day, and Franklin Roosevelt's speech there was the first by a president to be televised live.
Q 16Which chewing gum was among products launched at the 1893 Chicago fair?
Juicy Fruit
Juicy Fruit. William Wrigley had been giving gum away free with cans of baking powder, until the gum proved more popular than the powder he was selling.
Q 17Which city hosted the 1876 Centennial Exposition, America's first official world's fair?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence had been adopted a century before. President Grant and Brazil's Emperor Pedro II opened the fair by switching on the giant Corliss steam engine that drove its machines.
Q 18Which newly patented invention was demonstrated before Brazil's emperor at the 1876 Centennial Exposition?
The telephone
The telephone. Alexander Graham Bell had patented it only three months earlier, and praise from the judges there, among them the physicist William Thomson, brought it international attention.
Q 19Which part of the Statue of Liberty was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition?
The right arm and torch
The right arm and torch. Visitors paid to climb to the torch's balcony, and the arm then stood in New York's Madison Square Park for several years.
Q 20Which Olympic first belongs to the Games held as part of the 1904 St. Louis world's fair?
The first on American soil
The first on American soil. They had been awarded to Chicago, then moved to St. Louis to join the fair, and few athletes from outside North America made the trip.
The Grand Palais and Petit Palais. They replaced an exhibition hall left over from the 1855 Paris fair, and the nearby Pont Alexandre III was built for the same exposition.
Q 24Which Paris transit route opened for the 1900 exposition?
Métro Line 1
Métro Line 1. The city's first metro line opened a few months into the fair, and the Art Nouveau entrances that Hector Guimard designed for it still mark Paris stations today.
Q 25Which waterway's completion did the 1915 San Francisco exposition celebrate?
Panama Canal
Panama Canal. San Francisco also used the fair to show the world how fully it had rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake.
Q 26Which annual baseball event began as a one-off attraction for Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress fair?
The All-Star Game
The All-Star Game. A Chicago Tribune sports editor proposed it as a single 'Game of the Century' to go with the fair, and it proved so popular that it came back the next year for good.
Q 27What was the theme of the 1939 New York fair?
Building the World of Tomorrow
Building the World of Tomorrow. The fair opened on the 150th anniversary of George Washington's inauguration in New York, and four months later the Second World War began in Europe.
Q 28Which two structures formed the symbol of the 1939 New York fair?
Trylon and Perisphere
Trylon and Perisphere. The gleaming spire and globe rose on a former ash dump, the 'valley of ashes' that F. Scott Fitzgerald described in The Great Gatsby.
Q 29Which company's Futurama exhibit showed a model city of the future at the 1939 New York World's Fair?
General Motors
General Motors. The designer Norman Bel Geddes carried riders over a vast model of America as it might look around 1960, laced with automated highways.
Q 30Which Brussels landmark was built for Expo 58?
The Atomium
The Atomium. It was not meant to outlive the 1958 fair, but it proved so popular that it became a lasting symbol of Brussels.