On November 10, 1871, reporter Henry Stanley found explorer Livingstone in Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania, and greeted him with the now famous, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” This week’s quiz celebrates interesting meetings.

When they met

1. Fiction. Which old friend did Young Stamford meet at the Criterion Restaurant in London and take along to St Bartholomew’s Hospital to introduce to another of his friends?

2. In 1842, when the celebrated British author Charles Dickens visited the US, which then relatively unknown American author requested a meeting and asked for help to get his latest work — Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque — published in England? As it turned out, the English publishers Dickens approached declined the book.

3. What was significant about the handshake between Thomas Stafford and Alexey Leonov on July 17, 1975?

4. In 1981, whose visit to former Turkish ultra-nationalist Mehmet Ali Ağca in a prison in Rome made international headlines? And why?

5. On the morning of December 21, 1970, who turned up without notice at the gate of the White House requesting to meet President Nixon? He actually got a meeting and requested that he be appointed a “Federal Agent-At-Large”.

6. At 11.11 am on December 2, 1990, what was the significance of a handshake shared by two blue-collar workers, Robert Graham Fagg and Phillp Cozette, in the world of engineering and technology?

7. They first met when they were both travelling on the train to Malad. She got off and took a tonga to meet Khemchand Prakash at the Bombay Talkies studios. When he also took a tonga, she was sure he was following him till Prakash introduced them. A first meeting of which two legends?

8. The January 1931 issue of the magazine Modern Review was dominated by a discussion between Albert Einstein and which other Nobel Laureate who visited him in Caputh, near Berlin in 1930? They discussed science, beauty, consciousness and reality and the conversation is still regarded as a classic.

9. The two of them were first introduced in 1971 by Bill Fernandez, who later became one of their first employees. Fernandez was walking down the street with one who was still a school student when he met another friend, a college student washing his car. Which two people first met in such a manner?

10. According to the historian Plutarch, which two historical personalities first met when one of them was smuggled into the other’s room rolled up inside a rug by a certain Apollodorus?

Answers

1. Doctor John Watson was taken to meet Sherlock Holmes in A Study In Scarlet

2. Edgar Allan Poe

3. It was a handshake in space, when the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz docked with the American Apollo craft. It also marked the end of the space war and the start of international cooperation on space missions

4. Pope John Paul II visited Ağca in prison. Ağca tried to assassinate him, but the Pope survived despite the four bullets that hit him. The Pope also requested for a pardon and Ağca was released in 2006, only to be imprisoned again the same year

5. Elvis Presley. The picture of Elvis with the President is the most requested picture in the White House archives

6. It was 130 ft below the seabed and it marked the point where the French and British tunnels finally reached each other for the Channel tunnel connecting Britain to the European continent

7. Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar

8. Rabindranath Tagore

9. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who went on to found Apple Computers

10. Cleopatra met Julius Caesar

Joy Bhattacharjya is a quizmaster;

Twitter: @joybhattacharj

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