Bathroom Trivia
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50 free Bathroom trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
41 free bathroom trivia questions with answers. The bathroom is the one room everybody uses and nobody quizzes on, so here are forty-one questions about it. They cover who really invented the flush toilet (not Thomas Crapper), the Elizabethan courtier who built the first one, the S-trap, the pay toilets at the Great Exhibition, and why we 'spend a penny'. There is toilet paper history from 6th-century China to 'splinter-free' rolls, the pony that named the bidet, Japan's Washlet, the first mechanical shower and the confectioner who invented the plunger. Soap, toothbrushes, chamber pots, outhouses, Roman bath complexes, the rubber duck's Toy Hall of Fame induction, Archimedes in his tub and Psycho's shower scene all get a turn. It is a good set for a pub quiz round, a plumbing team, or anyone who reads in there. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the topics, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
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Q 01Which Elizabethan courtier described England's first flushing toilet, the Ajax, in a 1596 book?
Sir John Harington
Sir John Harington named it with a pun on 'a jakes', slang for a privy, and the book's barbs got Queen Elizabeth's godson banished from court again.
Q 02Alexander Cumming's S-bend of 1775 solved which problem of early flush toilets?
Sewer gases
Sewer gases are held back by the water that settles in the bend after each flush; the London watchmaker's trick was so simple that toilets still rely on it today.
Q 03Popular legend wrongly credits which Victorian plumber with inventing the flush toilet?
Thomas Crapper
Thomas Crapper held nine plumbing patents, none of them for the flush toilet; the legend owes most to a tongue-in-cheek 1969 biography called Flushed with Pride.
Q 04Which French revolutionary was stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday in 1793?
Jean-Paul Marat
Jean-Paul Marat spent much of each day in a medicinal bath to ease a skin disease and received visitors there, which is how Corday reached him with a hidden kitchen knife.
Q 05George Jennings installed the first public pay toilets at which 1851 event?
The Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition made his flushing 'Monkey Closets' in the Crystal Palace so popular that the first public lavatories opened the following year, billed as 'Public Waiting Rooms'.
Q 06The euphemism 'to spend a penny' comes from what?
Coin-operated toilet door locks
Coin-operated toilet door locks took one old penny in London's public lavatories, and the euphemism has outlived both the locks and the pre-decimal coin.
Q 07Which Roman emperor taxed public urinals and reputedly told his son that money does not smell?
Vespasian
Vespasian held a coin from the first payment to his son Titus's nose and asked if the smell offended him; street urinals in France are still called vespasiennes.
Q 08Very early toilets that used flowing water have been found at Skara Brae, a Neolithic village where?
Orkney, Scotland
Orkney, Scotland, hid the village under sand until a storm uncovered it in 1850, revealing stone houses with drains running beneath them.
Q 09Which ancient culture is credited with the world's first known urban sanitation systems?
The Indus Valley Civilisation
The Indus Valley Civilisation lined the main streets of cities such as Mohenjo-daro with covered drains, so waste water from houses was carried away instead of pooling in the lanes.
Q 10In which country was paper first recorded as being used for personal hygiene, in the 6th century AD?
China
China's scholar Yan Zhitui wrote in 589 that he dared not use paper bearing quotations from the Five Classics or the names of sages for toilet purposes.
Q 11Joseph Gayetty's Medicated Paper of 1857, America's first commercial toilet paper, was sold as a way to prevent what?
Hemorrhoids
Hemorrhoids were the pitch: the aloe-infused sheets were sold as a medical product, and their New York inventor was proud enough to print his name on every one.
Q 12Which firm popularised toilet rolls when it began marketing them in 1890?
Scott
Scott sold its first rolls through dealers under other brand names, because the brothers were too embarrassed by the product to put the family name on it for over a decade.
Q 13As late as the 1930s, the Northern Tissue company advertised its toilet paper with what selling point?
Splinter free
Q 21Which late-night TV host's 1973 joke about a toilet paper shortage sent Americans rushing to empty the shelves?
Johnny Carson
Johnny Carson's Tonight Show quip was taken at face value by viewers, and their panic buying created a real shortage that lasted for weeks.
Q 22Marcel Duchamp signed a porcelain urinal 'R. Mutt' in 1917 and entered it in an art show under which title?
Fountain
Fountain was kept out of sight at the 1917 show, yet in 2004 a poll of 500 art experts named it the most influential modern artwork of all time.
Q 23Which US president's administration broke up the price-fixing 'porcelain trust' of toilet makers in 1912?
William Howard Taft
Splinter free was a real boast: it took makers until the 1930s to refine toilet paper enough to promise that no slivers of wood were left in it.
Q 14Before toilet paper was common, which free publications did rural Americans hang in the outhouse and use page by page?
Mail-order catalogs
Mail-order catalogs from Sears arrived free in the post, which is one reason the first commercial toilet papers sold poorly: few people saw the point of paying for paper.
Q 15In TV adverts from 1964 to 1985, the grocer Mr Whipple scolded shoppers for squeezing which toilet paper?
Charmin
Charmin's fussy grocer became so familiar that a 1978 poll named him the third best-known man in America, behind only Richard Nixon and Billy Graham.
Q 16Which fixture is named after a French word for a pony?
Bidet
Bidet meant a small horse in French, and the name passed to the low basin because a user sits astride it like a rider.
Q 17Which Procter & Gamble soap, first sold in 1879, was advertised with the slogan 'It Floats'?
Ivory
Ivory was named in church, the story goes: Harley Procter, a founder's son, heard a psalm that speaks of 'ivory palaces' and knew what to call his new white soap.
Q 18Which Japanese company makes the Washlet, the electronic toilet seat that washes its user?
Toto
Toto began by importing American 'wash air seats' meant for hospitals and nursing homes, then launched its own improved Washlet in 1980.
Q 19Which mouthwash turned 'halitosis', an obscure medical term, into a household word through its 1920s adverts?
Listerine
Listerine was developed in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic and only reached shop shelves in 1914; the word it made famous had been coined by a physician back in 1874.
Q 20In which 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film does the most famous shower scene in cinema appear?
Psycho
Psycho toned down Robert Bloch's novel, in which the victim is beheaded in the shower; Hitchcock's film has her stabbed in a scene storyboarded by Saul Bass.
William Howard Taft's government beat the fixture makers in the Supreme Court; the famous story that he once got stuck in a White House bathtub is a tale no document supports.
Q 24Which ancient Greek reportedly shouted 'Eureka!' after noticing the water rise in his bath?
Archimedes
Archimedes is said to have leapt from the tub and run home naked through Syracuse, shouting the word; the tale comes from the Roman architect Vitruvius, writing some two centuries later.
Q 25In a Roman bath complex, what was the caldarium?
The hot room
The hot room stayed hot because its floor was raised on pillars, letting air from a furnace flow underneath and up through the walls.
Q 26The Farnese Bull and the Farnese Hercules were recovered from which Roman bathing complex?
Baths of Caracalla
The Baths of Caracalla were dug over in the 1540s on the orders of Pope Paul III, who wanted ancient statues for his family's palace; both marbles are now in Naples.
Q 27The earliest evidence of a cleansing fat-and-alkali mixture, around 2800 BC, comes from which ancient civilisation?
Babylon
Babylon left the oldest trace, in clay cylinders; Egypt's version turns up more than a thousand years later in a medical papyrus, as a treatment for skin diseases.
Q 28Traditional Castile soap, named for a region of Spain, is made from which oil?
Olive oil
Olive oil grew on the doorstep in Spain, Italy and France, which is why those three countries became Europe's early centres of soap making.
Q 29William Addis is believed to have made the first mass-produced toothbrush in 1780 where?
Britain
Britain's William Addis is said to have had the idea in Newgate prison, where he drilled holes in a bone saved from a meal and tied in bristles begged from a guard.
Q 30Before nylon took over in 1938, the bristles of most toothbrushes came from which animals?
Pigs
Pigs supplied the stiff neck hair of the first bristle toothbrushes, though Europeans found it too firm and often chose softer horsehair until nylon arrived.