What's Your Beef? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Burton and Speke

Discovering the source of the Nile was the "man on the moon" challenge of the 1800s. Several of the era's prominent explorers attempted to find its source, including David Livingstone and Samuel Baker, but it was the competition between Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke which led to the discovery. Burton was a renaissance man who was credited as an author, translator, cartographer, diplomat, poet and fencer, among other skills.

He was particularly known for his mastery of languages, reportedly being able to speak 29 tongues and being able to pass for a native in many of them. Speke was an army officer who had traveled around the Himalayas while he was stationed in India and had gone to Africa to get artifacts for his family's museum. Burton was already an established explorer when he met Speke in east Africa, and Speke then accompanied him on the journey to find the great lakes of Africa in the late 1850s.

Their expedition was beset with disease and troubles with the native staff, and it was while Burton was incapacitated with illness that Speke traveled on and found Lake Victoria, which he determined to be the source of the Nile.

However Speke did not have the equipment to properly survey the area, and when he returned five years later on another expedition with James Grant, he was unable to follow the river completely from Lake Victoria which left the source of the Nile in doubt. Burton disputed Speke's account and attacked his reputation, and when the two were scheduled to have a public debate, Speke reportedly ran out, claiming that he couldn't take the pressure any longer. He died later that day in a hunting accident, which Burton claimed was actually a suicide to avoid "exposure of his misstatements in regard to the Nile sources". Henry Morton Stanley (of Stanley and Livingstone fame) later confirmed Speke's account of the source of the Nile during a circumnavigation of Lake Victoria.

Answer: Burr and Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton was a founding father of the United States, and he served as the first Secretary of the Treasury, while Aaron Burr was the vice president of the United States under Thomas Jefferson. The two had a rivalry that reportedly dated back to the Revolutionary War when Hamilton received a promotion and Burr didn't. Over the years, they campaigned against each other with Burr defeating Hamilton's father-in-law in a Senate election, and Hamilton helping to defeat Burr when he ran against Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 presidential election. Burr served as Thomas Jefferson's vice president during Jefferson's first term, but Jefferson had decided to replace him for the second term, so as a lame duck vice president, Burr ran in the New York governor race in 1804. Hamilton once again campaigned against Burr, supporting a rival politician, and while doing so, Hamilton published disparaging remarks about Burr. Burr demanded a duel and on the morning of July 11, 1804, fatally wounded Hamilton. Hamilton died two days later, and Burr was charged with murder in both New York, where Hamilton died, and New Jersey, where the duel took place, but the charges were eventually dropped (dueling was illegal but still took place in those days).

Answer: The 47 Ronin

In the early 18th century, a feudal lord named Asano Naganori had had enough of the cruel treatment he received from a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, so he stabbed the man, inflicting non-fatal wounds. For his actions, Naganori was forced to commit a ritual suicide called seppuku.

The samurai who worked for Naganori became known as ronin once their master was dead, and forty-seven of them pledged to avenge his death. Yoshinaka suspected that the ronin would come after him, so he fortified his residence and made sure he was well-protected wherever he went. Additionally, he had spies follow the ronin to keep tabs on them.

The ronin disguised their intentions by dispersing and becoming menial workers, drunkards or monks for nearly two years which lulled Yoshinaka into a false sense of security.

This allowed them to quietly infiltrate Yoshinaka's life, with one of the men even marrying the daughter of the builder of Yoshinaka's house so that they could get the house design plans. Finally, they attacked Yoshinaka's house, decapitated him and placed his head on their master's grave.

They then turned themselves in for the punishment which they knew to expect. The ronin had achieved their revenge but paid the ultimate price; they too were forced to commit seppuku. The grave site of the Forty-seven Ronin is a memorial site located in Sengaku-ji, Japan.

Answer: A burial site

In the twelfth century, a general named Yoon Gwan was given a gravesite on a hill outside Seoul where he was buried and where future members of the Yoon family would also be interred. Then in the seventeenth century, several members of the Shim family including a former prime minister, Shim Ji Won, were also buried on that hill, destroying part of the memorial to Yoon Gwan.

In the eighteenth century, members of the Yoon clan sought revenge for the slight by destroying the graves of Shim family members, starting the full-fledged feud which resulted in armed battles.

A king intervened and exiled members of the families, but the feud continued even after a wall was built between the graves. Finally in 2008, the two families came to an agreement with the Yoon clan giving up land on a nearby hill for a cemetery for the Shim ancestors. Oddly enough, the local government refused to allow the transfer of the bodies, claiming that the feud was "part of the cultural heritage of the area".

Answer: Adidas and Puma

The Dassler brothers went into the shoe business together in the 1920s, and by the 1930s, Olympic athletes were wearing Dassler shoes. Things were going great until an incident during WWII. According to the story, Rudolf was in a bomb shelter with his family when Adolf and his wife arrived. Adolf made a crude comment about the bombers being back again, and Rudolf thought it was directed at his family.

The misunderstanding spiraled into a full-blown feud that tore apart their company. Adolf, who went by the nickname Adi, created Adidas, using his first and last names to come up with the company name. Rudolph, who used the nickname Rudi, used the same naming convention to come up with the company name, Ruda, but he ended up changing it to Puma.

They set up their factories on opposite sides of the river in the town of Herzogenaurach, and the town itself was dragged into the rivalry with businesses catering to one company or the other. The feud between the two brothers continued until their deaths in the 1970s when they were buried at opposite sides of the town cemetery.

Answer: Tesla and Edison

Nikola Tesla had worked for Thomas Edison, but their methods and lifestyles clashed, with Edison dismissing Tesla's ideas as impractical, and Tesla later stating in a "New York Times" article that Edison "had no hobby, cared for no amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene." According to Tesla's biographer, things between the two finally came to a head when Tesla quit the company after Edison reneged on an offer of $50,000 if Tesla improved the efficiency of one of Edison's inventions.

There is some debate as to whether this story is true, with one source maintaining that Tesla actually quit because he didn't get a raise. Regardless of his reason for leaving, Tesla had his revenge with the War of the Currents, which started in the late 1880s and was the debate over whether alternating or direct current would be the standard for electrical devices. Tesla wanted alternating current (AC), while Edison was for direct current (DC). DC was already in use in the United States, and Edison maintained that it was safer since it used lower voltage, but it wasn't easily converted to other voltages. AC could be converted using a transformer, and Tesla argued that AC was easier to transmit and more efficient since there was less loss during transmission. Since Edison received royalties on his DC patents, he aggressively campaigned against AC, even electrocuting animals with it to prove his contention that it was dangerous. Tesla had his own AC patents, most of which he sold to George Westinghouse, who himself had been feuding with Edison.

Then in 1893, the Chicago World's Fair selected AC over DC due to the lower cost, and later that year, the contract to generate power from Niagara Falls was granted to Westinghouse, using Tesla's technology. By 1896, even Edison's General Electric was using AC power. Unfortunately for Edison, he didn't live to see the resurgence of DC power at the end of the 20th century; computers, solar cells and electric vehicles are some of the technology that is now embracing DC power. Regardless of the rivalry between the inventors, Tesla was awarded the Edison Medal by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1917, and he paid homage to Edison in his acceptance speech: "When I came to America, I met Edison, and the effect that Edison produced upon me was rather extraordinary. I saw how this extraordinary man, who had had no training at all, did it all on his own."

Answer: Stalin and Trotsky

Vladimir Lenin died shortly after establishing the Soviet Union, and Leon Trotsky appeared to be his preferred successor, but Joseph Stalin had other ideas. Trotsky and Stalin had clashed in the early days of the newly-formed nation with Stalin refusing to follow Trotsky's orders, and Trotsky publicly criticizing Stalin.

But when Lenin had a stroke in 1922, Stalin used his intimidation tactics to destroy any support for Trotsky and ultimately had him expelled from the country. After leaving the country, Trotsky lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before being offered asylum in Mexico in 1937, where he resided with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo for a while before moving to his own residence.

While in Mexico, he was found guilty in absentia of treason in the Soviet Union, and Stalin's agents then tried to carry out the death sentence in Mexico.

He survived a machine gun attack at his home in May, 1940, but another attack carried out in August of that year achieved its goal. Ramón Mercador attacked Trotsky with an ice pick, injuring him but not initially killing him, but Trotsky died a day later on August 21, 1940, in the hospital.

Answer: Capone and Moran

Al Capone and George "Bugs" Moran had a turf war in Chicago during the 1920s, but their battles weren't just for control of the territory; they flat out didn't like each other. Moran claimed that Capone's gang was too brutal, and he disapproved of Capone's involvement with prostitution.

After Moran launched attacks on Capone and his gang, Capone retaliated on February 14, 1929 with what became known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Seven members of Moran's gang were lined up against a wall and shot numerous times with Tommy guns. Witnesses reported that the men who shot the gang members were dressed as police officers and had lined the men up with their faces to the wall, pretending to arrest them. Capone claimed to have been in Florida at the time of the massacre and no one was charged for the murders.

Although the massacre was the beginning of the end for Moran's operations, it also irritated the police enough that they went after Capone, eventually getting him jailed for tax evasion.

Answer: Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots

Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister, Mary I (aka Bloody Mary) as the Queen of England, but much of Roman Catholic Europe did not recognize her father Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and thus believed Elizabeth to be illegitimate. Mary Queen of Scots, was the great niece of Henry VIII (her grandmother was Henry's sister) and a cousin once removed to Elizabeth, so she also had a claim to the throne, and since she was Catholic, many Catholics believed her to be the true heir. Pope Gregory XIII even declared that killing Elizabeth wouldn't be a sin. But Mary Stuart made a number of poor decisions that eventually turned the Scots against her, and after she was driven from Scotland, she fled to England, creating an almost impossible situation.

Elizabeth had her locked up reportedly to keep her from raising an army on the continent. While imprisoned, Mary plotted against Elizabeth and was eventually convicted of the Babington Plot, which called for Spain to invade England and overthrow Elizabeth. She was then executed, reportedly without Elizabeth's permission, although it is believed that Elizabeth orchestrated the execution in a way that appeared to absolve her of any involvement.

Answer: Peary and Cook

By the end of the 19th century, the quest to be the first to reach the North Pole was one of the remaining great challenges on the planet. Finding the North Pole is no easy challenge; it is located on drifting ice, so determining where it is requires calculations using navigational instruments. Robert Peary was an experienced explorer when he met Frederick Cook who signed on as the doctor on Peary's 1891-1892 Arctic expedition; Cook even set Peary's leg after it was broken in a shipboard accident.

But the two had personal differences, and Cook decided not to participate in Peary's next expedition. In 1907-1908, both Peary and Cook started out on separate expeditions for the North Pole from Greenland, with Cook returning fourteen months later having claimed to have reached the pole on April 21, 1908. Peary and Matthew Henson, a fellow explorer who had served on several of Peary's expeditions, claimed to have reached the pole on April 6, 1909. Both expeditions passed through Annoatok, Greenland on the return voyage, with Cook leaving his instruments and journals from his trip at the port to await the next ship which wasn't scheduled to arrive until August 1909. Cook didn't want to wait for the ship so he traveled across Greenland to a southern port where he could catch a ship to Denmark.

When Peary arrived at Annoatok and heard about Cook's trip to the pole, he refused to allow any of Cook's equipment on the ship, leaving the boxes on the shore from where they were never recovered. When both explorers returned to New York, the battles really began, with Cook gaining the public's initial support by providing more detailed accounts of his travels than Peary (Cook had kept his detailed diary from the journey with him). But Peary's supporters then attacked a claim that Cook had previously made about summiting Mount McKinley in 1906, and after Cook's climbing partner admitted they hadn't reached the summit, Cook's reputation suffered, and Peary's claim to the North Pole was accepted. In subsequent years, the contribution of Matthew Henson to the expedition received recognition; Peary was incapacitated by the time they neared the North Pole and "was little more than cargo in Henson's sled", as Robert Bryce explained in his book "Cook & Peary - The Polar Controversy Resolved". But while Peary and Henson ended up receiving the credit, many sources including the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian, now doubt that they actually reached the pole. Author Bryce, who spent twenty years researching the expeditions, concluded that neither Cook nor Peary's expeditions reached the pole, although he believes that Peary and Henson were closer in their attempt.