The UK's Mundane Firsts Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ernie Wise

In 1981, the first private licence for a cellular network was sold in the UK to the Racal Electronics Group, which immediately set up a division primarily responsible for telecommunications. The same year, Racal formed a joint venture with Millicom to develop a UK based network which it named Racal Vodafone, which eventually became simply Vodafone by 1984. Development of the technology continued through the first half of the 1980s, with Vodafone ready to launch its service by the beginning of 1985 - one of the obligations of the licence that Vodafone had obtained was to start a public service by 31 March 1985.

As a means of publicly launching the technology, the chairman of Vodafone got in touch with the comedian Ernie Wise, who was an old acquaintance, to do a publicity stunt. To get the drop on rivals British Telecom, Vodafone made no announcement of any publicity. Instead, on 1 January 1985, Wise arrived at St Katherine's Dock in London in a nineteenth-century mail coach, dressed as a coachman, and, using the Vodafone VT1 mobile telephone, called Vodafone's corporate headquarters (at the time a set of rooms above a pub in Newbury, Berkshire) announcing "Hello, it's Ernie Wise here". Vodafone's monopoly of the UK cellular market lasted just nine days before BT Cellnet, the company set up by British Telecom, launched its own service. By the end of 1985, despite mobile phones costing upwards of £1500, more than 12,000 had been sold between Vodafone and BT Cellnet.

Answer: Carlisle

In the British Isles, pillar boxes for the collection of mail originated in the Channel Islands in 1852, when the novelist Anthony Trollope, who at the time was a surveyor for the Post Office, was sent to Jersey to investigate the issue of mail collection. At the time, mail was generally either taken to a post office, or collected by a so-called bellman. Trollope eventually recommended a concept that he had seen in Paris, of a secure, free-standing receptacle that mail could deposited in, and then collected at set times. The first such pillar boxes were installed in Jersey in November 1852, with Guernsey receiving its first boxes in February 1853.

The new post boxes were a success, with plans immediately put in place to have them installed on the UK mainland. In 1853, the same year as Guernsey received its boxes, the UK's first was fitted on Botchergate, a major street in the south of Carlisle. This original post box does not survive, but is commemorated with a replica located outside the city's Old Town Hall. The oldest boxes that remain in use date from 1856 and are located in the town of Framlingham in Suffolk.

Answer: Golden Wonder

Although potato crisps had been produced for home consumption since the early 20th century, the concept of them being sold in greaseproof packets originated with Frank Smith, who founded his company in 1920. Smith's idea saw crisps packaged in greaseproof packets, each containing a small sachet of salt that could be sprinkled over the crisps for seasoning purposes. This was the only variety of packaged potato crisps available in the UK until the 1960s. In 1960, Golden Wonder, the major rival to Smith's, began selling Ready Salted, a product where the salt was already added to the crisps, rather than being included in a separate sachet.

In 1954, Joe "Spud" Murphy founded the Tayto company in Ireland. Murphy devised a process whereby flavouring could be added to potato crisps, and devised the world's first flavoured crisps when Tayto launched their Cheese & Onion flavour crisps. The success of Tayto's new product led to UK based companies looking to licence Murphy's process. In 1962, two years after the launch of their Ready Salted crisps, Golden Wonder launched their own Cheese & Onion flavoured crisps for the UK market. Smith's ultimately countered by launching a rival flavour, Salt & Vinegar, in 1967.

Answer: Woolwich

McDonald's as a brand was started in 1940 by brothers Dick and Mac McDonald, who set up a burger stand in San Bernadino, California, before franchising the idea. In 1961, Ray Kroc, who had purchased a franchise from the brothers six years earlier, bought them out and began expanding McDonald's into a larger business, opening franchised outlets across the United States and Canada, before looking globally. The first McDonald's outside North America opened in 1970 in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, while the first European outlet opened the following year in Zandaam in the Netherlands.

At the time, burger restaurants in the UK followed the model of Wimpy, which generally used a table service model, with the food brought from the kitchen by servers to the customer at the table. However, on 13 November 1974, McDonald's opened its first UK outlet in Woolwich in South-East London. In addition to being the first UK McDonald's, the new Woolwich outlet was also the company's 3000th location worldwide.

Answer: Toothpaste

In 1954, the Television Act was passed setting up the Independent Television Authority. This was a body established to oversee the newly established independent television network (ITV) that was intended to break the monopoly on television in the UK that was held by the BBC. Unlike the BBC, which was funded primarily by a licence fee, the new service would be a commercial network with its funding coming from advertising. However, unlike American television networks at the time, which featured programming that was often sponsored by a single company, with it being unclear precisely what was programming and what was advertising, the new UK network was required to have clear differentiation between programmes and adverts. The network itself was set up as a series of regionally based franchises, which would create content, such as news, for its own local viewers, and broadcast content on a national network basis.

The first ITV franchise to begin broadcasting was Associated-Rediffusion, the weekday franchise holder for London, which started transmission at 7.15pm on 22 September 1955. At 8.12pm, ITV went to its first commercial break, with the first advert shown being for Gibbs SR toothpaste. The advert, which lasted approximately 60 seconds, featured a voice-over by Alex MacIntosh who, at the time, was a BBC in-vision continuity announcer, with a slogan stating that the toothpaste was "tingling fresh, it's fresh as ice".

Answer: Reg Varney

The principle of the Automated Teller Machine originated through the amalgamation of different inventions. In 1960, inventor Luther Simjian developed a machine that came to be known as the "Bankograph", which was designed as an automated deposit machine for both cash and cheques. Two years later, Adrian Ashfield devised a card system intended to allow users to be securely identified and goods / services to be dispensed accordingly. These elements were combined by an engineering team at the printing firm De La Rue led by John Shepherd-Barron, who devised a machine that could distribute cash. The first version of what came to be the ATM required the use of a machine readable paper cheque, issued by a cashier or teller, inserted into the machine, which would then dispense the equivalent amount of cash.

The first De La Rue machine was installed in a branch of Barclays Bank in Enfield, North London. On 27 June 1967, the machine was launched publicly, with actor Reg Varney approached to be the first person to use it. The event took place 30 minutes after the banks had closed, proving the benefit of being able to obtain cash outside opening hours. Varney was handed his paper voucher, which was entered, along with his special four-digit code, into the machine, after which a new £10 note was dispensed.

Answer: Harrods

The idea for the escalator originally came from a patent issued to Nathan Ames, a patent attorney from Massachusetts, in 1859. Although no working model of Ames' "revolving stairs" was built, the description of the device resembles the principle of modern escalators clearly. More than thirty years later, in March 1892, the "Endless Conveyor or Elevator" was patented by Jesse W. Reno. Reno eventually built the first working escalator, which was referred to as the "inclined elevator", which was installed next to the Old Iron Pier at Coney Island in New York City in 1896. Rather than a moving staircase, Reno's device featured an inclined belt that people stood on, with cast-iron cleats for traction.

At the same time as Reno was developing his device, other individuals and companies around the world were developing similar products, one of which was the French company Piat. In 1898, Piat was commissioned to install one of its escalators at Harrods in London. The Harrods escalator was an inclined belt consisting of 224 pieces of leather stitched together, at an incline of 40 degrees. Opening on 16 November 1898, the device caused a sensation, with staff at the top to revive customers that had been unnerved by the experience with brandy and smelling salts.

Answer: The Magic Flute

Public radio began in the UK when the Marconi Company started informal and sporadic broadcasts from a studio in Chelmsford in early 1920, which included broadcasts by the soprano Dame Nellie Melba. Although the Marconi operation shut down in November 1920, over claims that its signal interfered with transmissions from ships and aircraft, the station was reestablished in February 1922 as 2MT, the first radio station making regular entertainment broadcasts. In May of the same year, another station, 2LO, was launched. 2LO was ultimately absorbed by the new British Broadcasting Company (BBC) upon its foundation in November 1922, with a remit to establish a national radio network. The first programme to be broadcast was a news and weather bulletin at 6.00pm on 14 November 1922.

During the initial weeks of broadcasting by the BBC, programming was limited to the company's studios. However, in January 1923, Arthur Burrows, the BBC's director of programmes, had the idea to set up a broadcast of an upcoming performance of "The Magic Flute" by the British National Opera Company (BNOC) from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. With the assistance of the General Post Office to set up the link from Covent Garden to the BBC transmitter at Marconi House on the Strand, the broadcast was successfully accomplished on 8 January 1923. This was the first of many such outside broadcasts by the BNOC during the early years of broadcasting by the BBC.

Answer: Sunday Express

Although word puzzles resembling crosswords have been published since around the 1870s, the modern crossword is regarded to date from 1913, when the New York World, a major newspaper owned by the Pulitzer family, published a "word-cross" puzzle devised by Arthur Wynne, a journalist working for the paper. Wynne was responsible for the puzzle section of the newspaper's Sunday edition - on Sunday 21 December 1913, a word puzzle with a diamond shaped grid featuring a hollow centre was published. The puzzle, although containing features from earlier word puzzles, also featured innovations, including the use of vertical and horizontal lines to create boxes to allow letters to be entered. Subsequent to the first puzzle, Wynne introduced new innovations, most notably the use of shaded squares in a symmetrical pattern to separate words. The name "word-cross" was soon flipped to become "cross-word" - initially a typesetting error, the name ultimately stuck.

Crosswords soon took off as an activity, with many newspapers and other publications producing them, first in the United States, and then further afield. Crosswords first came to the UK in the early 1920s, with the very first British example published in Pearson's Magazine, a monthly periodical, in 1922. Two years later, the 2 November 1924 edition of the Sunday Express became the first British newspaper to publish a crossword, which was an adapted version of a puzzle originally devised by Arthur Wynne. During the 1920s, a UK innovation, the cryptic crossword, was devised by the poet Edward Powys Mathers. Originally just for the amusement of his friends, one of Mathers' puzzles was sent to the Westminster Gazette, which then asked for more such puzzles. Upon the demise of the Westminster Gazette in 1928, Mathers, using the nom de plume "Torquemada", began setting cryptic crossword puzzles for The Observer, continuing until his death in 1939.

Answer: Hibernian

The European Cup (now known as the UEFA Champions League) traces its history to a series of friendly matches organised by Wolverhampton Wanderers (Wolves) against opposition from Europe to promote the installation of floodlights at their Molineux stadium. In December 1954, Wolves played Budapest Honved, a team that contained a majority of the then dominant Hungarian national side, in a floodlit game televised live by the BBC. Winning the game 3-2, Wolves manager Stan Cullis declared his side to be "champions of the world". In response, the journalist Gabriel Hanot, writing in L'Equipe, suggested there were better teams in Europe, such as Real Madrid and AC Milan, and that a competition be set up allowing the best European teams to play each other. In April 1955, UEFA's congress approved the idea, with the new European Cup to start at the beginning of the 1955-56 season.

The 16 clubs that took part in the inaugural European Cup were selected by L'Equipe on the basis that they were representative and prestigious. Among the clubs were the English champions, Chelsea. Although the club were keen to take part in the competition, they were prevented from doing so by the Football League, who considered the tournament to be a distraction from domestic football. Also invited to take part were Hibernian, who had won the Scottish title in 1951 and 1952. However, they had only finished fifth in the league the previous season, with the title won by Aberdeen. However, with the tournament scheduled for midweek, it was necessary for participants to have floodlights, and Hibernian was the only club in Scotland at the time to have floodlights installed at their stadium. Hibs ultimately reached the semi-final, losing to eventual runners-up Reims 3-0 on aggregate.