History Dates Quiz – Fun, Food and Freedom

#1. The Würzburg witch trial, one of the four largest witch trials in Germany, began in the same year as…

…Thomas Shelton created a new shorthand system for English, using separate signs for each of the letters of the alphabet.

…Isaac Newton used a prism to split sunlight into the component colours of the optical spectrum.

…smoking tobacco was introduced into Europe by Spanish physician Francisco Fernandes.

1626

#2. The Diamond Sūtra, the world’s earliest dated, printed book was printed in China in the same year as…

…the mathematician Zhu Shijie solved simultaneous equations with up to four unknowns, equivalent to modern matrices

…Lady Godiva rode naked on horseback through Coventry to force her husband, the Earl of Mercia, to lower taxes.

…Cyril and Methodius, the creators of the first Slavic alphabet, arrived in Rome.

868

#3. The first unblemished mirrors were produced at Manufacture royale de glaces de miroirs in Paris in the same year as…

…the Battle of Ivry was won by Henry IV of France during the French Wars of Religion.

…Samuel Pepys began recording details of the Great Fire of London in his diary.

…the first recorded lottery in England was drawn in St Paul’s Cathedral.

1666

#4. The first widely documented epidemic in the New World that killed off much of the indigenous populations in Cetral and South America started in the same year as…

Martin Luther had a famous debate in Leipzig with his opponent, theologian Johann Eck.

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford opened as the world’s first university museum and Britain’s first public museum.

The English army, led by King Henry V, achieved victory in the Battle of Agincourt.

1519

#5. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, the first black woman poet of note in the United States, were published in the same year as…

The modern style of glasses, held by temples passing over the ears, was developed .

Elizabeth Blackwell, a British physician, became the first woman to achieve a medical degree in the United States.

Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev, an ataman of the Yaik Cossacks, began a great popular insurrection during the reign of Catherine the Great.

1773

#6. Jeanne Baré became the first woman known to have circumnavigated the globe with the expedition of Louis Antoine de Bougainville in the same year as…

Napoleon Bonaparte entered Paris after escape from Elba and began 100-day rule.

Scottish engineer James Watt granted a patent for a steam engine with a separate condenser, the basis for the Watt steam engine.

John Ogilby published The Britannia atlas, which set the standard for the future road maps.

1769

#7. Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel’s will established the Nobel Prize in the same year as…

Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake premiered in St Petersburg.

Cargo ship Mary Celeste, which sailed from US for Genoa, was found mysteriously abandoned four weeks later.

Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre by Vincenzo Perugia.

1895

#8. The first nuclear fission experiment in the United States was conducted by Enrico Fermi in the same year as…

John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in his laboratory in London.

The Bantu Education Act, a South African segregation law, legalised several aspects of the apartheid system.

Gone With the Wind directed starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh premiered in Atlanta.

1939

#9. The Mercator projection, a cylindrical map projection, was presented by Gerardus Mercator in the same year as…

The Strasbourg Agreement, the first international agreement banning the use of chemical weapons (poisoned bullets), was signed between France and the Holy Roman Empire.

The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women attacking female monarchs by the Scottish reformer John Knox was published.

The 1st recorded lottery in England was drawn in St Paul’s Cathedral.

1569

#10. Who’s Who was first published by Baily Brothers in the same year as…

Joseph Lakanal, a French politician, drew up schemes for normal schools (des écoles normales).

Austria launched pilotless balloons against the Italian city of Venice (the first air-raid in history)

The first opera performance in the Swedish language, Thetis and Phelée, was performed marking the establishment of the Royal Swedish Opera.

1849

Finish

Results

It’s fine, you can just tell us you’re an immortal. Your eerily good knowledge of the past gave it away immediately. Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.

Terrible effort. At this rate you’ll never get into time traveller school.