Trivia Origins
In the 1960s, nostalgic college students and others began to informally trade questions and answers about the popular culture of their youth. The first known documented labeling of this casual parlor game as "Trivia" was in a Columbia Daily Spectator column published on February 5, 1965. A stage contest held in Columbia's Ferris Booth Hall on March 1 of that year, reported in campus press and the New York Post, was the first occasion in which the pastime was formalized.
On September 13, 1965, four Columbia students appeared on the TV quiz show I've Got a Secret and competed in a trivia contest with the show's regular panelists. A much-publicized First Annual Ivy League-Seven Sisters Trivia Contest was held at Columbia the same semester. By 1966, other campuses had instituted Trivia bowls while colleges such as Lawrence University and Williams College began radio contests which continue to this day. In this manner, the codified form of the diversion became an institution.
In 1974, a former Sacramento air traffic controller named Fred L. Worth published The Trivia Encyclopedia, which he followed in 1977 with The Complete Unabridged Super Trivia Encyclopedia, and in 1981 with Super Trivia, vol. II. The popularity of books by Goodgold and Carlinsky, Worth and others in the 1960s and 1970s laid the groundwork for the first edition of the board game Trivial Pursuit in the early 1980s.
The enormous success of this game led to the re-launch of Jeopardy! in the United States, reviving a quiz show genre that had been dormant since the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. The American TV broadcaster ABC had a surprise hit with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, an import of a successful British quiz format which launched another wave of interest in trivia. In both the UK and Canada, the quiz format has enjoyed continuous success since the 1950s, untouched by the scandals that dogged the American format.
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