What Came First Trivia Questions

Written for this site; nothing was copied from another list. Questions and wrong choices are our own. Each explanation restates, in our own sentences, a fact from the English Wikipedia article named and linked beside the question (https://en.wikipedia.org, text under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license): Timeline of historic inventions. The text of each article was fetched on October 2 or 3, 2026, and on October 3, 2026 the passage that states each fact was read in it before the question was kept. Every question names two or four things and asks which came first. The date of each thing is the one that article gives it: the earliest evidence for an old invention, and the first working version or the patent for a newer one. The reason shown after an answer lists every date, so a table can see how close the call was. Where the article gives two dates for one thing and the choice between them would change the answer, or where two things fall within a year or two of each other, the pair is not asked. The match is the friction match of 1826 (the article also has sulfur matches in China in 577). The toothbrush is the bristle toothbrush, as the same encyclopedia's Toothbrush article describes the one of the Tang dynasty, read the same day; older ways of cleaning teeth are not what the date refers to. Left out on purpose: weapons, medicines, company and product names, and living people. Levels are our estimate: easy is fair for any table, medium suits people who know the subject, hard will stump most tables. Each question also carries the date its article was read (checkedOn). Licence: own work