Cleaning Trivia
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164 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 164 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
Saponification is the reaction in which fats or oils are hydrolysed by an alkali such as lye (sodium hydroxide), yielding soap and glycerol.
Q 03Ivory soap's famous slogan, introduced in 1891, was what?
It Floats!
'It Floats!' was Ivory's 1891 slogan, trading on bars whipped with air so they bobbed in the bath; its other tagline claimed 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
Sunlight was the world's first packaged, branded laundry soap, sold in wrapped tablets instead of cut from a slab; its profits built Port Sunlight, Lever's model village on the Wirral.
Q 05Persil, launched by Henkel in 1907, took its name from silicate and which bleaching agent?
Perborate
Persil fuses PERborate and SILicate: sodium perborate released oxygen bleach in the wash, letting Henkel sell it in 1907 as the first 'self-acting' laundry detergent.
Q 06Procter & Gamble's Tide, introduced in 1946, is recognised as the world's first what?
Heavy-duty synthetic detergent
Tide was the world's first heavy-duty synthetic detergent; P&G had cancelled the research as 'Project X', and 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 wartime blockade left Germany short of oils and fats for soap-making, so chemists built the first synthetic detergents from coal-tar derivatives instead; BASF's Nekal appeared in 1917.
Q 08Which chemist found in 1785 that chlorine could bleach fabric and discovered the first commercial bleach?
Claude Berthollet
Claude Berthollet showed in 1785 that chlorine bleached cloth and produced the first commercial bleach, Eau de Javel, in 1789; Scheele had isolated chlorine itself in 1774.
Q 09The first commercial bleach was named 'Eau de Javel' after a borough near which city?
Paris
Javel was a village on the Seine just outside Paris, now part of the 15th arrondissement, where Berthollet's bleach was first made in 1789; Tennant's solid bleaching powder followed in 1799.
Q 10The brand name Clorox is a portmanteau of chlorine and which other ingredient?
Sodium hydroxide
Clorox blends 'chlorine' and 'sodium hydroxide', the two chemicals reacted to make its hypochlorite bleach; Annie Murray built demand by giving away sample bottles at the family grocery 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
Gustav Raupenstrauch introduced Lysol, a cresol-and-soap disinfectant, in 1889 to help end a cholera epidemic in Germany; decades later 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
Q 21Which company introduced the first domestic automatic washing machine in 1937?
Bendix
Bendix Home Appliances introduced the first domestic automatic washer in 1937, a front-loader that had to be bolted to the floor; Hans Rosling later called the washing machine the Industrial Revolution's greatest invention.
Q 22Josephine Cochrane invented the first successful dishwasher in 1886 in which state?
Illinois
Cochrane built her hand-cranked, water-pressure dishwasher in a shed behind her home in Shelbyville, Illinois, patenting it in 1886; her company later 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?
Procter & Gamble's backstory makes Mr. Clean a former US Navy sailor; the character debuted on TV in 1958 and goes by Meister Proper in Germany and Don Limpio in Spain.
Q 14Which odour-trapping molecule is the active ingredient in Febreze?
Cyclodextrin
Febreze's active ingredient is cyclodextrin, a ring-shaped sugar molecule whose hollow core traps odour molecules; it went into test markets in 1996 and grew into one of P&G's billion-dollar brands.
Q 15Which British engineer built the horse-drawn 'Puffing Billy' in 1901 and may have coined 'vacuum cleaner'?
Hubert Cecil Booth
Hubert Cecil Booth parked 'Puffing Billy' in the street and ran hoses in through windows; he had tested suction by sucking through a handkerchief on a chair, and 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
Spangler was the caretaker, or janitor, at a department store in Canton; asthmatic, he blamed his carpet sweeper and built a prototype from 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
William Hoover ran a leather-goods business making horse harnesses and saddles in North Canton; Spangler had given a machine to his cousin Susan Troxel Hoover, William's wife, 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
Dyson built 5,127 prototypes over about five years before the G-Force; the cyclone idea came from a sawmill's dust extractor, and 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
iRobot introduced the Roomba in September 2002, shortly after Electrolux's Trilobite reached shops; it sold its first million units within about two years.
Servants kept chipping her good china
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
Miele built Europe's first electric domestic dishwasher in 1929, three decades after its founding in 1899; the company had already sold its first washing machines in 1901.
Q 25Which solvent, known as 'perc', became the dominant dry-cleaning solvent from the 1950s?
Perchloroethylene
Perchloroethylene, or 'perc', is a non-flammable chlorinated solvent that displaced petroleum-based cleaners from the 1950s; earlier cleaners had used gasoline and kerosene, with predictable fire risks.
Q 26The first laundromat opened on April 18, 1934, in which Texas city?
Fort Worth
J. F. Cantrell opened the first 'Washateria' in Fort Worth on April 18, 1934, renting out four electric washers by the hour; older Texans kept the name, and in Britain they are launderettes.
Q 27Which element's ions, together with calcium, make tap water 'hard'?
Magnesium
Hard water carries dissolved calcium and magnesium ions picked up from limestone and dolomite; they react with soap to form scum and drop out as limescale when heated, and softeners swap them for sodium.
Q 28Brillo pads, patented in 1913, combine steel wool with what?
Soap
Brillo pads pair steel wool with soap, originally a separate cake sold with the pads; they were invented because new aluminium pans blackened easily, and the founders paid their lawyer, Milton Loeb, in shares.
Q 29Ettore Steccone named his single-blade window squeegee after which US political programme?
The New Deal
Steccone, an Italian-born window washer in Oakland, patented his single-blade 'New Deal' squeegee in 1936; its light brass handle and sharp rubber blade replaced the bulky two-blade 'Chicago squeegee'.
Q 30Ostrich-feather dusters were developed in 1903 in which city?
Johannesburg
Missionary Harry S. Beckner devised the ostrich-feather duster in Johannesburg in 1903, binding feathers from South Africa's ostrich farms to a broom handle; earlier American dusters had used turkey feathers.