Did You Know...? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Dallas

Braniff International Airways had been one of the American airlines to have placed an order for Concorde when it was first offered for sale, putting in a bid to purchase three aircraft in 1966. The energy crisis of the early 1970s saw this order subsequently cancelled in 1973, but the airline retained an interest in using the aircraft. As a result, in December 1978, during a period when Braniff was implementing a major expansion programme, it entered agreements with British Airways and Air France to lease up to 11 Concordes to run domestic services between Washington, D.C. and Dallas. These would operate as extensions of the British Airways and Air France flights to the capital, with their crews exchanged for Braniff's own crews, who would take the aircraft on as a domestic flight to Dallas.

The first scheduled flights took place on 12 January 1979, with one aircraft each from British Airways and Air France landing at Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport simultaneously. Owing to the restriction on supersonic flight over land, Braniff's services were limited to a high of Mach 0.95. Despite this, they were still able to take 20 minutes off the flight time to Dallas of an equivalent short-haul airliner. However, the service never gained popularity with the public, with passenger loads rarely more than 50%. As a result, Braniff ended its leasing arrangements and terminated the service in May 1980.

Answer: Canada

In the 1970s, staff at Canada Post noticed that a large number of letters to Santa were entering the Canadian postal system. Owing to the addresses being used, these letters were treated as being undeliverable, and so, not wanting children to be disappointed at the lack of a response, staff began answering them. As a result of the increasing amount of mail being sent every Christmas, in 1983 Canada Post decided to set up an official Santa letter response programme, which included a special address, including a Canadian postcode.

Postal codes in Canada operate using an alphanumeric system consisting of six digits, with a space in the middle, using the sequence LNL NLN, where 'L' is a letter and 'N' is a number. For letters to Santa, Canada Post devised the postcode H0H 0H0, which can be read as "Ho, ho, ho". In this context, the postcode itself is anomalous, as 'H' is primarily used to indicate addresses in and around the city of Montreal, while '0' is for rural areas. Besides Santa's, the only other H0 postcode in use is H0M, which is assigned to the Akwesasne tribal reserve that straddles the boundary between Ontario and Quebec, as well as crossing over the order into New York State.

Answer: Bob Holness

In 1978, Gerry Rafferty began recording material for his first solo album since leaving the band Stealer's Wheel. As part of the process, he hired in Raphael Ravenscroft, a session musician, to play the saxophone on two of the tracks planned for the album, "Baker Street" and "Island". The saxophone riff that was used on "Baker Street", the second song on the album, helped it to become a major international hit, reaching number 3 in the UK Top 40, and number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. Despite this, Ravenscroft received the standard Musicians' Union freelance rate of £27.50 for his work in the session.

In the 1980s, the New Musical Express (NME) ran a column called "Would You Believe It?", in which detailed various facts about music, some of which were true and some made-up. The NME's assistant editor, Stuart Maconie, contributed an item to this column in 1990 stating that Bob Holness, then most well-known for presenting the TV quiz show "Blockbusters", had actually played the saxophone part on "Baker Street". This gained a degree of traction, to the point that it subsequently became a well-known urban legend, with Holness often questioned about it in later years.

Answer: Carla Tortelli

In early episodes of "Cheers", Carla, the eponymous beer hall's waitress played by Rhea Perlman, often spoke of her deadbeat ex-husband, Nick Tortelli, with whom she had four children. Initially an unseen character, Nick, played by Dan Hedaya, first appeared in the season 2 episode "Battle of the Exes", which featured his wedding to the bubble-headed Loretta, played by Jean Kasem. Nick and Loretta made a number of subsequent appearances in "Cheers", with their popularity eventually leading the show's producers to develop a spin-off for the pair, which would also feature Nick and Carla's teenage son Anthony and his young wife Annie.

"The Tortellis" premiered on NBC on 22 January 1987, with the premise seeing Loretta having left Nick and fled to live with her sister in Las Vegas, after which Nick follows her in an effort to reconcile. In this, he attempts to reform, and sets up a TV repair business and, with Anthony and Annie also having made the journey, lives with Loretta in the house of her sister, Charlotte. Despite its origins, "The Tortellis" was not successful, and ended up being cancelled after just 13 episodes. However, the characters that originated in "Cheers" soon made returns to the parent show, with the situation from "The Tortellis" often referenced in their subsequent appearances.

Answer: Liechtenstein

"God Save the King" as a piece of music with lyrics first appeared in published form in 1744 and, over time, came to be adopted through use and custom, as the national anthem of the United Kingdom. However, the music is believed to be considerably older than this, possibly dating as far back as the early seventeenth century. Because of its use as a royal anthem, the music, with altered lyrics, has also been used as such in many other countries over time, including various German kingdoms and principalities (including Prussia, Hanover and Saxony), Sweden, Greece, Switzerland and Imperial Russia, as well as forming the music of the American patriotic song "My Country, 'Tis of Thee".

In the 1850s, Jakob Josef Jauch married the music to a set of lyrics he had produced that celebrated the River Rhine - these "Rhine songs" were used to celebrate the river as part of the German patrimony, in opposition to claims by France. Jauch's song, "Oben am jungen Rhine" ("High on the young Rhine"), eventually appeared in print in 1875 at which point it had been adopted as the de facto national anthem of Liechtenstein, where Jauch had lived for four years in the 1850s. The song's status in Liechtenstein was made official in 1920 and it has been, since 1961, the only remaining national anthem to share its music with "God Save the King".

Answer: Los Angeles Rams

Having graduated from the University of Utah, where, in addition to studying art, he played both halfback and cornerback for the Utah Utes. Fred Gehrke joined the Cleveland Rams in 1940. In 1941, he attempted to report for military service, but was not accepted owing to a previous knee operation, instead taking a job with Northrop Aircraft as a technical illustrator. That allowed him to continue playing football professionally, which he did for various teams in Los Angeles. Following the end of the war, he returned to the Rams in the NFL where, in the 1945 season, he led the league in average rushing yards, being named All-Pro. The following year, he remained with the Rams following their move to Los Angeles. The move to the West Coast allowed Gehrke to return to his job at Northrop, a common situation for professional football players, who were at the time fairly poorly paid.

During the mid-1940s, Gehrke had played with the idea of having logos on football helmets. At the time, helmets in the NFL, although mandatory, could be made either of reinforced leather or plastic. In 1948, upon discussing the idea with Rams head coach Bob Snyder, Gehrke, making use of his art skills, painted a pair of longhorn ram horns on an old football helmet as a demonstration for the team owner, Dan Reeves. Having been assured by the league that there was no rule against logos, Reeves commissioned Gehrke to put the design onto 75 helmets for the team, a job that took him most of the summer of 1948. The new helmet logo was debuted in a preseason game against the Washington Redskins. By 1949, Riddell Sporting Goods had designed a plastic helmet that allowed the logo design to be baked in, leading to more professional teams to come up with their own helmet designs. Today, the only team in the NFL without a helmet logo is the Cleveland Browns.

Answer: Barclays Bank

The ATM traces its history back to the early 1960s. In 1960, inventor Luther Simjian developed a new automatic depositing machine called a "Bankograph". This was designed to allow people to deposit cash or cheques automatically into their bank account. Two years later, an engineer named Adrian Ashfield devised a card based security system that could be used to identify individual users and control the dispensing of goods and services. These two concepts were subsequently brought together in 1967 by an engineering team at the printing firm De La Rue, led by John Shepherd-Barron, to become a card controlled machine to allow the dispensing of cash.

The new system, which came to be called the De La Rue Automatic Cash System (DACS), was purchased by Barclays Bank, with the first such machine installed in the branch in Enfield in North London. Put into use on 27 June 1967, the first person to use the new service was British actor Reg Varney. The system operated through inserting a machine readable paper slip issued by a cashier; the slip could be read by the machine, and dispense the requisite amount of cash. The DACS machine beat a similar system developed by Chubb for the Westminster Bank by a month, with both accessed by a single-use token. In 1969, a small company called Speytec developed a new system for the Midland Bank, which became the first that was accessible using a plastic card with a magnetic strip, leading to the concept that remains in use.

Answer: Duke of Atholl

In December 1777, the 4th Duke of Atholl raised a new infantry regiment tasked with serving as a relief unit in place of other regiments that were then serving in North America. This regiment, which took the name Atholl Highlanders, was in existence for three years until it was disbanded in 1781 under the original terms under which it was raised. More than 50 years later, in 1839, the grandson of the 4th Duke, then known as Lord Glenlyon, resurrected the name for a bodyguard formed to escort him to the Eglinton Tournament in Ayrshire. Three years after that, the Atholl Highlanders were employed to guard Queen Victoria, during her tour of Perthshire. This, along with their service providing a guard for her while staying at the Duke's home, Blair Castle, in 1844, led to the Queen honouring the Atholl Highlanders by conferring on them an official stand of colours, giving them regimental status as the personal bodyguard of the duke.

The regiment was often used to guard important personages, as Blair Castle was a convenient stopping point on the route to Balmoral. However, it fell into abeyance after the First World War until being resurrected by the 10th Duke in 1966. Since then, the regiment has had an annual inspection by its commander-in-chief, coinciding with the Atholl Gathering held every June, while it is often invited to tour and parade, with its pipes and drums, in locations that have links either to Blair Castle, or the Clan Murray, of which the Duke of Atholl is the head.

Answer: Stockholm 1912

Following the establishment of the modern Olympic Games in 1896, several then-popular and widely practised sports were included in the programme. However, nothing at that point existed to test an athlete's all-around capabilities in a manner similar to the pentathlon that was an event of the ancient Olympic Games. The ancient pentathlon consisted of five events - running, long jump, discus throw, javelin throw, and wrestling - that were considered to be important skills for a soldier of the time. To commemorate this, for the programme of the 1912 Summer Olympics, held in Stockholm, a new sport was devised that took this idea and translated it to skills that would be used by a modern cavalry soldier - fencing, shooting, riding, swimming and running. This event was based on other military, multi-sport events that were often held in Sweden at the time.

Modern pentathlon, as the new sport came to be called, was initially held over four or five days. However, this was altered in time for the 1996 Summer Olympics, which saw the event compressed into a single day. Over time, in an effort to make it more spectator friendly, the sport has undergone numerous revisions - in 1988, the riding discipline was changed from a 4km cross-country event to a 300m show jumping course; in 2000, the running discipline was reduced from 4km to 3km and the swimming from 300m to 200m; in 2009, the running and shooting disciplines were combined into a single element, with 3 x 1000m laps of running each preceded by a target shoot. In 2022, following controversy at the 2020 Summer Olympics, riding was eliminated altogether, to be replaced after the 2024 Olympics with an obstacle course race.

Answer: Samoa

The Samoan islands are located in the central Pacific, around 2,900km from New Zealand, and consist of two major elements - American Samoa, which is an unincorporated territory of the United States, and Samoa, which is an independent nation. In 1892, three of the Great Powers - Great Britain, Germany and the United States - were battling for commercial influence in Samoa. This led to, in that year, Malietoa Laupepa, the ruler of Samoa, being persuaded to move his nation's time zone from where it was, which put it around three hours ahead of Sydney in Australia, to a new time zone three hours behind Los Angeles, as a result of the increasing trade between Samoa and the United States.

By the start of the 21st century, much of Samoa's economy had shifted from trading with the US to trading with Australia and New Zealand. However, as Samoa had remained in the time zone it adopted in 1892, this put it an entire day behind the east coast of Australia. So, in order to improve its trading links, the Samoan government made the decision to revert back to the time zone it occupied before 1892, with the change taking place on 29 December. This had the effect of moving the calendar straight to 31 December, effectively skipping over 30 December altogether. However, American Samoa, which is just 64 km east of Samoa, remained in the previous time zone. As a result, crossing from one to the other means changing the time by 24 hours.