Your timeline, to true scale
Most timeline quizzes stop at right or wrong. This one draws your deck on a true-scale bar, so you can see which inventions were crowded together and which were decades apart.
Check your order above and the real gaps appear here.
The telephone and the phonograph arrived about a year apart. It is easy to guess decades.
How do you remember the order of inventions?
Anchor each invention to what it needed first. Flight needed light engines; a satellite needed rockets; the web needed computers on networks. Then sort by dependency before you sort by date. Most sorting mistakes come from guessing by fame instead of asking "what had to exist before this?"
Chain the needs
Telegraph wires came before telephone wires. Sound recording came before radio music. Follow the chain and the order falls out.
Watch the near-ties
Bell's telephone (1876) and Edison's phonograph (1877) are one year apart. Close pairs are where quizzes catch people.
Say what the date means
"Invented" can mean a patent, a first working model or a public launch. Our cards name the exact event, the way PastRush labels every exhibit, so the answer is never a matter of opinion.
Ask "what had to exist first?" and half the deck sorts itself.
How PastRush plays in 3 steps
- Pick a mode. Try Which Came First?, where you tap the older of two events. Dates historians still debate are left out, so every round has one right answer.
- Rebuild a chronology. Inside each case you put events in order, with BC and AD dates handled correctly.
- See the real distance. A true-scale time bar shows how far apart two events really are, like the one on this page.
Inside the app
The dates and where they come from
| 1844 | Morse's first telegraph message, Washington to Baltimore (Library of Congress) |
|---|---|
| 1876 | Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone (Library of Congress) |
| 1877 | Edison's first phonograph, Menlo Park (National Park Service) |
| 1903 | Wright Flyer's first flight, December 17 (Smithsonian) |
| 1928 | Fleming discovers penicillin at St Mary's Hospital (Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust) |
| 1957 | Sputnik 1 launched, October 4 (NASA) |
| 1989 | First proposal for the World Wide Web, March (CERN) |
| 2007 | iPhone introduced, January 9 (Apple Newsroom) |
All checked November 3, 2026. Each deck deals six of these eight.
This quiz vs PastRush
One honest limit: PastRush has no dedicated "inventions" case. The closest is the history of printing, which is one of the six paid cases. If your child only wants invention trivia, this page may be all you need. Who should pick something else: anyone after a fast reflex game, or a quiz that reads questions aloud for early readers.
This page sorts dates. The app asks how we know them.
Make it a habit with PastRush.
Five claims a day in the Daily Evidence Check, plus Which Came First? whenever you have a minute. No ads, no account.
More from Pocket Puzzle Arcade
- Which came first history quizA which-came-first history quiz: tap the older of two events, see the real gap on a time bar, and find out what surprised you. Sources for every date.
- Years between BC and AD calculatorCount the years between a BC date and an AD date without the off-by-one error. Free calculator, worked example and a true-scale time bar.
- History games for middle schoolHistory games for middle school, compared from their own sites: Mission US, iCivics, Reading Like a Historian and PastRush. Scratch a real exhibit label.
- Primary vs secondary sources examplesPrimary vs secondary sources, with 12 real examples, a 3-tap quiz and straight answers to the questions students and parents ask most.