170 free Cleaning trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
45 free Cleaning trivia questions with answers. Cleaning trivia for anyone who has ever wondered who invented the dishwasher (a socialite who was tired of chipped china) or why a vacuum is called a Hoover in Britain. The quiz covers the inventions - Booth's horse-drawn Puffing Billy, Spangler's soap-box suction sweeper, Dyson's 5,127 prototypes, Bendix's 1937 automatic washer, the Roomba - and the chemistry: what saponification is, why bleach was once called Javel water, how Febreze traps a smell. The brands get a round too: the Ivory soap that floats, the Persil that named itself after two ingredients, Tide's secret 'Project X', Clorox's portmanteau, Mr. Clean's naval past, Lysol's cholera origins, Swiffer's Japanese inspiration and Domestos's door-to-door start. Then a little culture: where spring cleaning comes from, the Latin behind 'janitor', the climbing boys of Victorian chimneys and Marie Kondo's spark of joy. It works for a family quiz, a workplace round or a spring-cleaning break. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 170 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Evidence of soap-like materials being made goes back to around 2800 BC in which ancient civilisation?
Babylon
Proto-soaps mixing fat and alkali turn up in Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian texts.
Q 02What is the name of the chemical reaction that turns fats and an alkali such as lye into soap?
Saponification
Soap made from pure olive oil is known as Castile or Marseille soap and is prized for its mildness.
Q 03Ivory soap's famous slogan, introduced in 1891, was what?
It Floats!
The name came from Psalm 45's 'ivory palaces', and its other slogan claimed it was 99 and 44/100 percent pure.
Q 04Sunlight, launched by Lever Brothers in 1884, is described as the world's first what?
Packaged, branded laundry soap
Its success named Port Sunlight, the model village Lever built for his workers on the Wirral.
Q 05Persil, launched by Henkel in 1907, took its name from silicate and which bleaching agent?
Perborate
It was the first laundry detergent to combine bleach with the detergent, marketed as 'self-acting' to end hand-scrubbing.
Q 06Tide, introduced in 1946, is recognised as the world's first what?
Heavy-duty synthetic detergent
P&G had cancelled the research as 'Project X'; chemist Dick Byerly kept working on it in secret.
Q 07Synthetic detergents were first developed in Germany in World War I due to a shortage of what?
Oils and fats for soap
The chemists turned to coal tar as a raw material instead.
Q 08Which chemist found in 1785 that chlorine could bleach fabric and discovered the first commercial bleach?
Claude Berthollet
Scheele had discovered chlorine itself eleven years earlier.
Q 09The first commercial bleach was named 'Eau de Javel' after a borough near which city?
Paris
Charles Tennant of Scotland patented solid bleaching powder in 1799 as an alternative.
Q 10The brand name Clorox is a portmanteau of chlorine and which other ingredient?
Sodium hydroxide
Annie Murray built demand by giving away sample bottles at the family grocery store in Oakland.
Q 11Domestos bleach was first produced in 1929 by Wilfred Handley and sold door to door in which English city?
Newcastle
An early slogan claimed it 'kills 99% of all household germs'; Lever Brothers bought the company in 1961.
Q 12Lysol was introduced in 1889 by Gustav Raupenstrauch to help end an epidemic of which disease in Germany?
Cholera
In the mid-20th century it was also marketed, disturbingly, as a feminine-hygiene douche.
Q 13According to Procter & Gamble's backstory, Mr. Clean was a sailor in which service before he took up cleaning?
The US Navy
He made his TV debut in 1958; in Germany he is Meister Proper and in Spain Don Limpio.
Q 21Which company introduced the first domestic automatic washing machine in 1937?
Bendix
It looked like a modern front-loader; statistician Hans Rosling called the washing machine the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution.
Q 22Josephine Cochrane invented the first successful dishwasher in 1886 in which state?
Illinois
Her company eventually became part of KitchenAid, and she entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.
Q 23What was Josephine Cochrane's motivation for inventing the dishwasher?
Servants kept chipping her good china
Q 14Which odour-trapping molecule is the active ingredient in Febreze?
Cyclodextrin
It went into test markets in 1996 and by 2010 was a billion-dollar brand for P&G.
Q 15Which British engineer built the horse-drawn 'Puffing Billy' in 1901 and may have coined 'vacuum cleaner'?
Hubert Cecil Booth
He tested the idea by sucking through a handkerchief on a chair and studying the dirt on the underside; he also designed Ferris wheels.
Q 16James Murray Spangler, who patented the first portable electric vacuum in 1908, had what department-store job?
A caretaker
He was asthmatic and blamed his carpet sweeper; his prototype used a fan motor, a soap box and one of his wife's pillowcases.
Q 17Spangler sold his patent to a local maker of what, whose name became Britain's verb for vacuuming?
Leather goods
Spangler had given one of his machines to his cousin Susan Troxel Hoover, which is how the family found out.
Q 18About how many prototypes did James Dyson build before launching the G-Force vacuum in 1983?
5,127
The cyclone idea came from a sawmill's dust extractor; his earlier invention was the Ballbarrow.
Q 19Where did James Dyson first launch his bagless cleaner after every UK manufacturer refused it?
Japan
It won a Japanese design prize in 1991; the Dual Cyclone later became the fastest-selling vacuum ever in the UK.
Q 20The Roomba robot vacuum was first introduced by iRobot in which year?
2002
Bissell and another company had turned down early prototypes in the 1990s; its rival at launch was the Electrolux Trilobite.
She showed nine machines at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where hotels and restaurants took notice.
Q 24Which German company made Europe's first electric domestic dishwasher in 1929?
Miele
Commercial machines sanitise with a final rinse of about 82 °C or a chemical sanitiser.
Q 25Jean Baptiste Jolly is said to have hit on dry cleaning in 1825 after what spilled on a tablecloth?
Oil from a lamp
He used kerosene and gasoline; the less flammable Stoddard solvent arrived in 1924 and 'perc' took over in the 1950s.
Q 26Which solvent, known as 'perc', became the dominant dry-cleaning solvent from the 1950s?
Perchloroethylene
Earlier cleaners used gasoline and kerosene, with predictable fire risks; perc took over in the 1950s.
Q 27The first laundromat opened on April 18, 1934, in which Texas city?
Fort Worth
Older Texans still call them washaterias; in Britain they are launderettes.
Q 28P&G's Swiffer was modelled on the Quickle Wiper, a 1995 electrostatic cleaner from which country?
Japan
Swiffer uses a razor-and-blades model: cheap handle, endless refills; it grew into a half-billion-dollar brand.
Q 29Brillo pads, patented in 1913, combine steel wool with what?
Soap
They were invented because new aluminium pans blackened easily; the founders paid their lawyer, Milton Loeb, in shares.
Q 30Ettore Steccone named his 1936 single-blade window squeegee after which political programme?
The New Deal
It replaced the bulky two-blade 'Chicago squeegee' with a light brass handle and a sharp rubber blade.