TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This episode of “Tracing the Path” explores the fascinating history and evolution of knowledge assessment and trivia, tracing its roots from ancient civil service exams to modern-day game shows.

It highlights how the concept of testing “merit” through knowledge originated with the Han Dynasty’s civil service tests and influenced subsequent systems, like the British and US civil services, and the development of the multiple-choice format for mass assessment.

The narrative then shifts to the rise of popular culture and “trivia” as a shared cultural phenomenon, emphasizing its transformation from academic pursuits to recreational quizzes on radio and television, culminating in the creation of iconic shows like Jeopardy! and the widespread popularity of games like Trivial Pursuit.

The podcast ultimately reveals how these diverse strands of knowledge, testing, and shared popular culture converged to create the modern landscape of trivia and its surprising applications, even in elite military training.

The Trivium of Merit Based Testing

We will recently honor to hear that many future potential Jeopardy contestants were using this podcast to get ready for the show. And for those recommending us, we thank you dearly. In honor of that, we give you this episode, Three words. Trivium. Trivial. And Trivia. 

Knowledge. Knowledge Knowledge has been a measurement of merit since the Han dynasty. Then a test was administered for those looking to serve in the civil service to determine if they could recognize 9,000 Chinese characters.

The Han Dynasty Civil Service Test is the earlies quiz, test or exam history has divulged to us, and it was able to influence history over a thousand years later.

That was 1849 in London.

Prince Albert chaired the Royal Society for the Arts and was busy putting together the world’s first international trade expo to be known as the Great Exhibition of 1851, which six million people would eventually come visit.

Charles Trevalian and Stratford Northcut were put in charge of the accounting of it. One of their hurdles was hiring people who would stand up to growing public scrutiny. The government had long lived with a system of patronage where favors often meant more than merit. So after the Great Exhibition was over, Travalian and Northcut set out to revamp how the British Civil Service operated.

As a model, they looked back at the Han Dynasty exam and put together the Northcut Trevalian report, recommending the British do the same. The British Civil Service would fill positions entirely based on merit, using tests and quizzes to determine if a person had the requisite knowledge.

The United States would also look to merit-based testing.

Before entering World War I, the U.S. maintained a neutral position and carried 150,000 soldiers in its army. But a German attack would force America’s entrance into the war.

On May 18, 1917, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, requiring all men between 21 and 45 to enter the war.

24 million men registered.

Their 150,000 soldiers quickly grew to 2.8 million. No one would be immune from the draft.

Even Irving Berlin, Al Capone, Duke Ellington, Henry Houdini, Norman Rockwell, and Babe Ruth would get draft cards.

With so many new recruits, the army didn’t have an efficient way to evaluate them for placement.

The President of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Robert Yerkes, had a solution. He had followed the advancements of the Kansas Silent Reading Test that had been implemented to test their students students reading and comprehension.

The director of Kansas schools needed to save time and money in scoring tests without losing quality. So he had invented a multiple choice test that was not only easy to grade, but also eliminated subjectivity from the results.

Dr. Yerkes thought this would be perfect for the U.S. Army.

He knew that if the American Psychological Association could help the Army in a non self-serving way, it would help raise the stature of the Association. So he took the idea directly to the Army and they accepted it, and they tested over 1.7 million recruits.

The general public fully accepted the format, and the multiple choice test was made permanent.

A few years later, the College entrance exam board adopted the idea as well, as it was far easier to manage than the traditional essay tests. From that they created the Scholastic Aptitude or the SAT to test incoming students’ knowledge.

The first one was administered in 1926. And then in 1934, IBM invented a machine that could read the graphite from number two pencils, thus being able to automate the scoring of multiple choice tests.

But all of that is purely academic, math, science, and reading.

The Origin of the Word Trivia

The culture of the 20th century would open the window to a new kind of knowledge, a window that may now be closed. The end of the 19th century, along with the whole of the 20th, existed an era of pop culture importance that hadn’t existed before, and will never exist again. 

A handful of newspapers, newly invented radio, and three television stations, made every topic a nationally shared event. Marconi’s radio, Ford’s vehicle, Sears’s catalog, Hollywood movies and theaters, comic books and superheroes, like Robert Ripley, The Beatles and Batman.

Not to forget, the twentieth century had two unifying world wars.

What truly makes us American, what makes us Canadian, British, South African, and Kiwi, in a certain way, is the centrality of our shared popular culture. It is what ties us together.

Like academics, math, ancient history and science, what we retain from our experiences is often shared as nostalgia. But it can also be tested. Now, we are talking about trivia.

The word trivia didn’t appear until the 20th century, but we often encounter the word trivia in medieval times. Then “the trivia” were the academic collection of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which Plato explained were the three critical subjects to a classical education.

In Latin, the word “trivia” means the place where three roads meet, try, and via, which is exactly what our popular culture is, the knowledge we all share. Over the centuries, there have been examples of cultures using trivia knowledge, but they have been sporadic.

For instance in 1691, a London bookseller launched a newspaper, the Athenian Gazette, and asked readers to send in questions about popular books. And there were pubs in the 18th century that advertised quiz nights as a form of entertainment.

It wasn’t until 1884 that we find a book full of trivial facts, Albert Southwicks, Quizism, Quirk’s Quibbels and Questions. And then in 1902, the son of the famous Quaker, Robert Pearsall Smith  and friend of Walt Whitman, wrote the book “Trivial Bits of Information of Little Consequence.” 

The word trivia, however, still had an entered common usage. The Oxford English Dictionary had an entry from 1782, but in that case trivia meant an odd-looking person.

Two years before the Great Depression, Justin Spafford and Lucian Esty of Amherst College, evolved the notion of the pop culture quiz. They published a book called Ask Me Another, where they featured the results of 30 famous people’s answers to pop culture questions.

It was the first evidence that people also enjoyed seeing what someone else knew.

While these kinds of questions were typically asked of famous people or academics, radio stations thought “Ask me Another” might make a good show and in 1928 a radio quiz show was birthed.

And then in 1938 the quiz show format really took off in the US and UK with two shows getting massive attention, Transatlantic Spelling Bee, and Information Please. “Information Please” became so popular in the US and Canada that it and its host John Kiernan became part of the popular culture it quizzed about.

The popularity of quiz shows wasn’t necessarily a statement about quiz shows themselves, but more a referendum on the popularity of radio and its limited choices. Radio was bringing us Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Sammy K. and Benny Goodman, as well as making Big Band music the hit of the 30s and 40s.

Bring on the College Bowl

Perhaps nothing is more telling about the power of radio than the reaction to Orson Wells’ 1938 production of the War of the Worlds.

So when World War II entered the scene, soldiers lamented over the shows and programs they knew they would miss. That’s why General George C. Marshall suggested to President Franklin Roosevelt that he mobilized civilian public service organizations to provide some sort of recreation and stress relief for the troops in the field.

Roosevelt thought it was also a good idea. So he had the leader of the YWCA, Mary Ingraham, create the United Service Organization, or USO. By combining the efforts of the Salvation Army, the YMCA, the YWCA, the National Jewish Welfare Board, the National Catholic Community Service, and Traveler’s Aid Association. They were to coordinate and provide education, entertainment, and special needs for the troops.

Right away, they look to the stars of radio, bringing groups like Big Bands to Europe to play for the troops. With Sammy K’s hit song, “Remember Pearl Harbor,” he was brought to play. Along with Sammy came his lyricist, Don Reed. To give the band a short break during their show, Don offered to host another form of entertainment.

He was a huge fan of the radio show “Information Please”, and thought he could do a live quiz show with the troops, and the troops absolutely loved it. They loved being part of the two teams on stage, and they loved watching it. The feedback invigorated Don Reed.

When he returned to the US, he teamed up with a friend John Moses and developed the live quiz show into a radio program. Having just spent time with 18, 19, and 20-year-old kids, he thought he could recreate that energy by making it a college bowl.

He figured he could pit colleges against each other, and if they recorded remotely at each college, he could capture the sounds of the fans each team had an attendance, giving it a big sporting event feel.

It first aired on NBC radio on October 10th, 1953, with Northwestern University, beating Columbia, 135-60. 26 episodes of College Bowl were taped, with the winning teams receiving $500 for their schools.

$500 was about the biggest prize at the time. Many of the quiz shows on the radio and those that pioneered the format on TV offered up prizes like an encyclopedia set or fridge or a notebook set.

To the FCC, this was all new. 

The idea that contestants could win prizes seemed akin to gambling. The FCC operated by the rule that it had the power to enforce the statute prohibiting the broadcasting of any lottery or similar scheme involving prices. So it threatened to rescind ABC’s broadcasting license if it persisted. ABC wouldn’t stand for that and took the FCC to court.

The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court in 1954, with the Supreme Court determining that as long as contestants didn’t have to pay to be on the show, it wasn’t gambling.

So prizes were legal, and the courts made no limit as to how big.

That decision changed TV and radio forever, and made games like College Bowl make the leap to TV to get bigger sponsors and bigger prizes.

When Trivia Hit TV

College Bowl landed General Electric as their lead sponsor. Like College Bowl, Louis G. Cowan had created popular radio shows like “Quiz Kids” and “Stop the Music”. And when he saw College Bowl move to TV and gain the big sponsor of General Electric, he wanted in.

He too could see how lucrative TV dollars could be, so he took his small quiz show and launched a new one, called the $64,000 question.

The second big stakes money show to launch and get Popular was called 21.

Cowan was able to secure Revlon as the $64,000 question sponsor and 21 got Geritol.

But the bigger money came with higher expectations.

When Jack Barry and Dan Enright launched 21, the first night was a dismal failure, as neither contestant could really answer the questions. The people at Geritol shared their dismay and demanded changes.

For the big money, they needed a big audience, which meant the show needed to be a bit more choreographed, a bit more groomed. So the show began to help the contestants they thought the audience would like, and replaced them once their luster wore off.

Herb Stumple looked like the underdog, the everyday man, and so to keep him as a contestant, he began to get the answers to the questions in advance. Herb advanced all the way to $69,000 in prize money before the producers ran into the handsome and debonair, Columbia University professor Charles Van Doren.

In seeing Charles, they asked Herb to take a fall and miss a question on purpose. Dangling future shows and more riches as a character in front of him. Well, he did, and then the public fell in love with Charles Van Doren, far beyond the $100,000 mark. 

But when the pressure got to Charles and the sense of cheating paranoia got too much, he missed a question on purpose, seeding his crown to Vivian nearing.

The promises never came in for Herb Temple, so he contacted the FBI and let them know the show 21 was rigged. And thus began the 1950s quiz show scandal that rocked television in America. For Americans who felt like they were watching a true competition between two people, the questions and answers of which truly astounded them, It was like letting the air out of the balloon. 

People had a sense they were unfairly duped. Unfairly misled. All those moments of pure amazement were just nothing. America lost trust in quiz shows and to some degree, TV. And since radio and TV were so new, there was no law preventing it.

Nobody could be punished, so Congress did the only thing it could do. It amended the Communications Act, making it illegal to offer secret help to game show contestants.

The airwaves would soon replace all such shows with others, like Merv Griffin’s dating game and the Newlywed game, which brings us to the second hero of our story, Ed Goodgold.

Ed Goodgold Explodes Trivia

Ed was born in 1943 in Tel Aviv, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where he learned English by watching The Shadow, Hardy Boys, Green Hornet and Davey Crockett, US popular culture, coursed through his veins.

When he grew up, he attended Columbia University, where he and his friend Dan Karlinski loved reminiscing about their common memories of radio programs, music, comics, and sports heroes. It was their favorite pastime. They even made a game out of it and played other students in the dorm.

 Ed even hosted a late-night call-in show on the student radio station.

One day, he and Dan Carlinsky decided they wanted to organize a giant quiz contest, so he wrote an article in the Columbia newspaper called The Spectator that read:

 “Trivia is a game played by countless young adults who on one hand realize they have misspent their youth, and yet on on the other hand, do not want to let it go.”

It would be the very first time the word trivia was used in this context.

Ed Goodgold, virtually, coined a new term that would define the twentieth century. Borrowing the format Don Reed created to entertain the troops in World War II and creating the GE College Bowl, Ed and Dan created a trivia contest at Columbia.

The event was so successful. Other colleges called and hopes of organizing their own. The University of Colorado, Williams College, Stevens Point, Beloit, and Lawrence College all started their own college trivia contest.

In fact, Lawrence College’s Great Midwest Trivia Contest is the oldest continuous competition of its sort.

The college trivia bowls are the first time trivia quizzes and contests weren’t relegated to horn-drimmed academics or people on TV, trivia games were becoming a regular pastime.

In 1963, Merv and Julane Griffin were seeing the cultural shift and thought America might be ready for a quiz show again. Merv was still worried people would still be a bit skeptical about the contestants getting the answers ahead of time.

But Julane had an idea. She said, “What if we gave the contestants the answers on purpose?” And then we made the contestants come up with the questions. We’ll tell them the answer is 5,280, and they’ll have to figure out the question, “how many feet are in a mile?”

We’ll give them the answer “1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue”, and they’ll have to figure out “What is the address of the White House?”

Brilliant, they thought.

So they developed a game with categories and point values and presented it to NBC as, “What is the question?”

But the executives weren’t sure.

They didn’t know if the game would still be compelling after a few episodes of just answering questions. They asked that Merv and Julane retool it and add more situations where the contestants could be put in Jeopardy.

So they made some tweaks, like subtracting points for incorrect responses. And they changed the name from “what’s the question?” to  “Jeopardy”.

On March 30, 1964, the first episode of Jeopardy launched against Dick Van Dyke on the other channel. Within weeks, it had 40% of the audience share, and it stayed on the air until 1975.

When TV Trivia Becomes a Board Game

With trivia now all above, PubMed trivia at pubs across the nation began again as a form of entertainment. It was being played at colleges in pubs and on TV, but not yet at home. In fact, the only game culture that existed in the 1970s, at home, was for kids.

Games like Chutes and Ladders and Candyland, with the possible exception of chess and checkers.

Chris Haney and Scott Adams, two friends in Montreal, were avid Scrabble players. One night in 1979, they couldn’t find all the pieces to their Scrabble game. And spent the evening asking each other trivia questions instead.

They got to pondering about Scrabble wondering how much money Scrabble has made. And they started thinking maybe they could make their trivia game into a big money maker as well.

So like every entrepreneur does, they got out paper pen and cardboard and started crafting a game. They glued pieces of paper to their corrugated board and stole game pieces from their closet. They broke their game into trivia categories and figured out some rules.

Then to really try to make it work, they found 32 people to invest in their dream and printed 1000 games, which they quickly sold around Montreal.

Their biggest problem wasn’t the format or competing games, but that video games were now on the rise, leaving board games as yesterday’s news.

Nevertheless, they fought tooth and nail in both the American and Canadian markets, but only found themselves in debt.

They exhausted local toy and game conferences until they had an idea. What if they approached the owner of Scrabble? The Scrabble people had already understood games for adults.

The Scrabble producers Selchow and Righter, after playing the game, absolutely loved it. And they loved the name, “Trivial Pursuit.” Selchow and Righter then helped Trivial Pursuit become a juggernaut, selling 20 million units.

But more importantly, Trivial Pursuit would change the American culture. The idea of “game night” became a thing, ushering in an entire industry of games for adults, like Scattergories, Pictionary, Boulder Dash, and even Settlers of Catan.

From Merv Griffin, Trivial Pursuit was another sign that his trivia game showed Jeopardy, which had been off the air since 1978, still had legs.

So in 1984, with a new host, Alex Trebek, Jeopardy would become a worldwide sensation.

And he’s not the only one to bring an old game back.

In 2020, Don Reed’s son would bring College Bowl back to TV, this time with Peyton Cooper Manning hosting a football themed version.

Selchow and Righter would be bought by Coleco for $75 million and then by Hasbro for $85 million. And Coca-Cola would buy more of Griffin Enterprises for $250 million.

Logan Pearsall Smith’s 1902 book titled “Trivial Bits of Information of Low Consequence” . . . would be wrong. Trivia changed the 20th century.