A short history of trivia

It's a Tuesday. There are eleven people in the pub, six of them in three teams of two, and one of them is arguing that the answer to question four is definitely Portugal. Somebody hands round a photocopied sheet with a picture round on the back. Nobody is winning anything except a bar tab.

This is one of the most successful entertainment formats ever devised, and it took about two thousand years to arrive at that room.

The word starts at a crossroads

Latin trivium: a place where three roads meet. Not a metaphor — an actual junction, the sort of place where people stopped, waited, and talked rubbish at each other. The word carried that flavour of ordinary public chatter from the beginning.

Medieval universities then gave it a technical meaning that pulled in a slightly different direction. The trivium was the first three of the seven liberal arts — grammar, logic and rhetoric — studied before you were let anywhere near the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. The trivium was the foundation course. Elementary, in the neutral sense.

From "elementary" to "unimportant" is a short and slightly unfair slide, and English took it. By the sixteenth century "trivial" meant slight or of little consequence, and it's meant that ever since.

The part that surprises people is how recent the modern noun is. Trivia meaning small entertaining facts collected for fun didn't settle into English until the twentieth century, and the specific sense we use — competitive recall of pop-culture minutiae — is younger still.

Two students at Columbia named the thing

The modern sense has a reasonably firm origin. In the mid-1960s two students at Columbia University, Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, started running contests built entirely on the trivial residue of American mass culture — radio serials, comic books, advertising jingles, the names of minor characters. They called it trivia, and in 1966 they put out a book of it.

The contests caught on across American campuses almost immediately, and the word came with them. Before that, "trivia" didn't mean a quiz; afterwards it did.

What they'd spotted is the thing the whole format still runs on. Facts that don't matter are more fun to compete over than facts that do, because nobody's ego is on the line and everybody's memory is roughly as unreliable as everybody else's.

Nobody knows where "quiz" came from

The other word in this story is a genuine mystery, and the story most often told about it is almost certainly false.

That story goes: in 1791 a Dublin theatre manager called Richard Daly bet that he could put a meaningless new word into the English language within twenty-four hours, hired street children to chalk "quiz" on walls across the city overnight, and won. It's a wonderful anecdote. There's no contemporary evidence for it at all — the earliest tellings turn up decades later — and lexicographers file it under folklore.

The honest position is that the origin is unknown. The word appears in the late eighteenth century meaning an odd or eccentric person, drifts towards meaning a practical joke or a hoax, then towards to question or interrogate, and doesn't arrive at "a test of knowledge" for another century.

We keep bringing this up because it's the exact shape of the problem this whole site exists to handle. A satisfying story and a true one are different objects, and knowing which one you're holding is the more useful skill.

Radio got there first

Quizzing became mass entertainment because of a technical accident: radio needed cheap content, and a man asking questions is about as cheap as content gets.

American networks worked it out in the 1930s. Professor Quiz is usually named as the first of the US radio quiz shows, arriving in 1936. Information Please followed in 1938 and inverted the format — listeners sent in questions and tried to stump a panel of experts, which is a structure that still turns up regularly. Take It or Leave It started in 1940 with a prize ladder topping out at sixty-four dollars, and gave English the phrase "the sixty-four dollar question" for anything difficult and decisive.

Britain took a slightly different route. Round Britain Quiz began on the radio in 1947 and is still running, which makes it about the oldest quiz programme anywhere. Brain of Britain followed in the 1950s. Both were austere, both assumed the listener was clever, and neither of them gave away much money — a pattern that turned out to matter enormously the following decade.

The thing radio discovered, and the reason none of this has ever gone away, is that a listener at home can play along and can be right. That's the whole engine. Everything since is packaging.

The rigging scandal that nearly killed it

American television took the radio format and bolted enormous prizes onto it. The $64,000 Question launched in 1955 — the name a direct lift from the old radio phrase, inflated a thousandfold — and Twenty-One followed in 1956. Ratings were vast. Contestants became household names.

They were also, in several cases, being fed the answers.

Producers of Twenty-One coached favoured contestants, supplied questions in advance, rehearsed the agonised pauses and decided in advance who'd lose. The reasoning was straightforward and, on its own terms, correct: a compelling champion was worth more in ratings than a fair contest. The champion they built was Charles Van Doren, a young Columbia English instructor from a famous literary family, who beat the incumbent Herb Stempel in a run that carried him to about $129,000 and onto the cover of Time.

Stempel, who'd been instructed to lose, started talking. A New York grand jury investigated in 1958, a congressional subcommittee took it up, and on 2 November 1959 Van Doren testified in Washington and admitted the whole thing.

The fallout was immediate and enormous. Programmes were cancelled within weeks. Van Doren lost his teaching post and his television contract. Congress amended the Communications Act in 1960 to make rigging a contest of intellectual knowledge or skill a federal offence, which is why that particular crime has its own statute in American law.

What the scandal exposed is the load-bearing fact about the entire genre. Audiences didn't mind that the show was a show. They minded, ferociously, that the knowing was fake. Watching someone know things is only entertaining if they actually know them, and that turns out to be non-negotiable.

A good deal of what looks like quiz-show ceremony dates from the response — sealed envelopes, independent adjudicators, visible question security, published rules. It's all theatre about honesty, and it's theatre the 1950s made necessary.

Britain built the difficult version

While American networks were retreating from big-money quizzes, British television went the other way and made difficulty itself the attraction.

University Challenge started in 1962 on ITV, adapted from the American College Bowl, hosted by Bamber Gascoigne. Two teams of four, starter questions on the buzzer, bonuses if you get it. It ran until 1987, came back on BBC Two in 1994 with Jeremy Paxman in the chair, and has never really changed shape. The prize is a trophy.

Mastermind arrived in 1972, devised by Bill Wright, and is stranger than it looks. A single contestant in a black chair under a spotlight, two minutes on a specialist subject of their own choosing, two minutes on general knowledge, no help and no comfort. Wright had been a prisoner of war, and the format's interrogation atmosphere — the light, the isolation, the clipped questioning — was reportedly drawn from being questioned himself. The two catchphrases that came out of it are "I've started, so I'll finish" and, more usefully for the contestant, "pass".

Neither programme offers money. Both are still on. That combination should tell you something about what the format is actually selling.

The pub quiz was a marketing scheme

The British pub quiz, which now feels ancient, is younger than the Moon landings and started as a commercial fix for a business problem.

Pubs are empty on Mondays and Tuesdays. In the mid-1970s, quiz leagues began supplying landlords with ready-made question sets and a format, on the correct theory that a reason to come in on a dead weeknight would fill the room. The usual origin story credits a pair of organisers who started supplying pub quiz leagues in 1976 and turned it into a business.

It worked far better than a promotional gimmick had any right to. Within a decade the quiz night had stopped being a marketing device and become a social institution with its own conventions: teams with jokey names, a picture round, a music round, a half-time break for the raffle, and a rule about phones that everyone agrees to and somebody breaks.

The economics were never really the point. The format gives a group of people a licence to sit together for two hours, argue about something with no consequences, and go home. That's a rarer commodity than it sounds.

Trivial Pursuit and the lawsuit about a fake fact

In December 1979, two Canadian journalists — Chris Haney, a photo editor, and Scott Abbott, a sports writer — sat down in Montreal for a game of Scrabble, found tiles missing, and started talking about inventing a game instead. That's the founding story and it appears to be true.

Trivial Pursuit reached Canadian shops in 1981 and the United States the following year, and then did something very few products manage: it went from slow start to complete cultural saturation in about two years. 1984 was the peak, with something over twenty million copies sold in that single year. Total sales have run past a hundred million.

Mechanically the game is nothing. You move a token round a track and answer questions and collect coloured wedges. There's no design innovation in it whatsoever. What Haney and Abbott had was the right read on the pleasure — people enjoy being asked things in company, and the enjoyment survives losing badly.

The best story attached to it is the lawsuit. Fred Worth, who'd compiled The Trivia Encyclopedia, had salted his book with a deliberate fake: he gave Columbo a first name, Philip, which the character never has on screen. When that invented detail turned up in Trivial Pursuit, Worth sued, arguing the fake proved his book had been copied wholesale. He asked for a very large sum. He lost, on the grounds that facts aren't copyrightable and Trivial Pursuit's people had never denied using published reference books as sources. The appeal failed and the Supreme Court declined to hear it in 1987.

Which is a strange and rather beautiful outcome. A fact he'd made up was found not to be his, because facts belong to nobody, including facts that aren't facts.

Going global, and going wrong again

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? launched on ITV in 1998 and turned out to be the most exportable television format ever made, running in well over a hundred countries. The design is brutally efficient: one contestant, one question at a time, a visible money ladder, and lifelines that let the audience participate without deciding anything.

It also produced the genre's second great scandal, which is almost a compliment to the format's importance. In 2001 an army major named Charles Ingram won the top prize on the British version, apparently guided towards correct answers by coughing from the audience. He was convicted in 2003. The episode has since been picked over endlessly, dramatised twice, and argued about by people who think the coughs were coincidence.

Note the pattern. Both times a quiz format got big enough to matter, somebody tried to fix it, and both times the audience reaction was out of all proportion to the money involved.

Why search engines didn't finish it off

The obvious prediction, once every fact was three seconds away on a phone, was that quizzing would die. Knowing things would stop being a distinction anyone bothered performing.

That didn't happen, and it's clear enough now why not. The appeal was never information scarcity. Quizzing is a social structure with a scoreboard: it gives a group a reason to sit down together, a frame for harmless conflict, and a stream of small uncertainties that each get resolved within a minute. A search engine supplies the facts and none of the rest of it.

Look at what people actually do with quizzes and the social part is obvious. They play in teams. They argue about the answer more than they enjoy getting it. The best moment in most quiz nights isn't a correct answer at all — it's the twenty seconds afterwards when somebody explains why.

What did change is what counts as a good question. When anything can be looked up instantly, obscurity stops being impressive, and the value shifts to questions that are satisfying to reason towards, or that leave you holding something once they're resolved. That's a harder brief than the old one. It's also a much better one.

The trivium was a junction where people stopped, exchanged something small and carried on. Two thousand years later there's a pub with eleven people in it, and one of them still thinks it's Portugal.