Every network problem the internet solved had been solved once already, differently.
The internet feels like a break with everything before it, but almost every problem it addresses had been tackled by earlier networks. The telegraph collapsed the time a message took to cross an ocean from weeks to minutes. Radio removed the wire. Satellites removed the need for a physical link between continents at all. These questions cover those systems and the people usually credited with them — with a note where the popular attribution is contested, which in this field it frequently is.
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
Play it insteadAnswer: B. Coded electrical pulses along a wire
Why: Morse code assigned each letter a pattern of short and long pulses. The first transatlantic cable worked in 1858.
Answer: A. Long-distance radio transmission
Why: He achieved a transatlantic signal in 1901. Several others contributed to the underlying science, and priority is still argued.
Answer: D. The 1920s
Why: Mechanical systems appeared in the 1920s and electronic ones displaced them in the 1930s.
Answer: C. Stay above the same point on Earth
Why: It orbits at about 35,800 km, matching Earth's rotation. Arthur C. Clarke described the idea in 1945.
Answer: B. An attempt to type "login" that crashed after two letters
Why: The system failed after "lo" in 1969. The full word arrived about an hour later.
Answer: A. Scanning it and sending the image as a signal
Why: The principle predates the telephone: an early version was patented in 1843.
Answer: D. The overwhelming majority
Why: Satellites handle a small share. Fibre-optic cable on the sea floor carries almost all intercontinental traffic.
Answer: C. Human operators connecting calls by hand
Why: Automatic exchanges spread from the 1890s, though manual boards survived in places for decades.
Answer: B. Bounces off the ionosphere
Why: That reflection allows intercontinental broadcast without any infrastructure in between, which is why it was used for international services.
Answer: A. The United Kingdom
Why: The Penny Black appeared in 1840, establishing prepayment by the sender as the standard.
Communication Before the Internet has 10 questions and takes about 7 minutes to finish. It is rated Medium and sits in our Technology category.
Each of the 10 correct answers adds 10 XP, up to 100 XP for a clean run. Wrong answers cost you nothing, and your full question-by-question review is shown at the end.
Yes. All 10 questions carry a written explanation of why the correct answer is right, so the quiz works as a study sheet as well as a test.
Yes, as often as you like. The questions and the answer options are reshuffled on each run, and you can use Practice Mistakes afterwards to retry only the ones you missed. No account is needed to play.
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