50 free Washing Machines trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This washing machines trivia quiz spins through the history of the appliance that freed households from wash day, from Jacob Christian Schäffer's 1767 design to direct-drive drums controlled from a phone. The easy questions are ones anyone who has done laundry could answer: what a top-loader's agitator does, what a twin tub is, which brand's repairman was famously lonely, and which country prefers front-loaders. The harder end is for appliance nerds and history readers: the first US patent for clothes washing in 1797, the Canadian who combined a washer with wringer rolls, why Alva Fisher is wrongly credited with the electric washer, the 1937 Bendix that had to be bolted to the floor, the Hoover Keymatic's plastic cartridges, the cheap Rolls Razor twin tubs of the 1960s, the New Zealand company that introduced direct drive in 1991, James Dyson's counter-rotating drums, the concrete block hidden inside a front-loader, and the Swedish statistician who called it the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution. Whirlpool, Maytag, Miele, Tide, laundromats and dryers get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the machines and the companies that build them before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our inventions, household appliances and famous brands quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Swedish statistician called the washing machine the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution?
Hans Rosling
He argued its impact on the liberation of women outweighed every other invention.
Q 02In which country was Jacob Christian Schäffer's washing machine design published in 1767?
Germany
He was a clergyman and naturalist from Regensburg.
Q 03Who received a British patent for a rotating drum washer in 1782?
Henry Sidgier
Edward Beetham sold numerous patent washing mills in England in the 1790s.
Q 04Who was granted the first US patent titled Clothes Washing, in 1797?
Nathaniel Briggs
He was from New Hampshire.
Q 05Which Canadian patented a Clothes Washer With Wringer Rolls in 1843?
John E. Turnbull
He worked in Saint John, New Brunswick.
Q 06Which religious community produced the Improved Washing Machine registered in 1858?
The Shakers
Nicholas Bennett of Mount Lebanon invented the wash mill and assigned the patent to Canterbury Shaker Village.
Q 07As early as which year were electric washing machines advertised in newspapers?
1904
The identity of the first inventor of the electric washer remains unknown.
Q 08Alva Fisher is often wrongly credited with inventing which appliance?
The powered washer
The US Patent Office shows at least one earlier patent than his number 966677.
Q 09How many electric washing machines were sold in the US in 1928?
800,000
By 1940, 60 percent of wired American homes had one.
Q 10What share of the 25 million electrically wired US homes had an electric washer by 1940?
60%
Many machines still used a power wringer rather than a spin dryer.
Q 11Which company introduced the first domestic automatic washing machine in 1937?
Bendix Home Appliances
It was a subsidiary of Avco, which had merely licensed the Bendix name.
Q 12Why did the first 1937 automatic washer have to be anchored to the floor?
It had no drum suspension
Without suspension it would otherwise walk across the room.
Q 13What did Bendix invent in 1953, sixteen years after its first automatic?
The washer-dryer combination
Most washer-dryers today are front-loading.
Q 21Which New Zealand company introduced direct-drive brushless motors to washers in 1991?
Fisher & Paykel
Its SmartDrive line reached spin speeds up to 1,100 rpm.
Q 22What was unusual about James Dyson's CR01 ContraRotator of 2000?
It had two counter-spinning drums
Samsung's later QuickDrive used a single drum with a counter-rotating impeller instead.
Q 23What was the Staber System 2000 of 1994 the only US-made example of?
A top-loading horizontal-axis washer
Q 14What did the Hoover Keymatic use to program different wash cycles?
Plastic cartridges with slots
The cartridges had slots and ridges around the edges.
Q 15Which cheap brand helped make twin tub machines briefly popular in the UK in the 1960s?
Rolls Razor
The smaller tub is really a spinning drum for centrifugal drying.
Q 16What is the smaller tub of a twin tub machine actually for?
Spinning clothes dry
The larger tub has only an agitator at its bottom.
Q 17Which design dominated the UK by the 1970s, when automatics finally took over?
Front-loading drum
Top-loading vertical-axis machines have dominated the US and Canada instead.
Q 18Which design has been dominant in the United States and Canada?
Vertical-axis with a lid
It uses a central agitator to move clothes through the water.
Q 19What did Hoover trademark as the Pulsator on its Hoovermatic machines?
A side-mounted impeller
It spins in one direction, dragging clothes along a toroidal path.
Q 20What is typically hidden inside a residential front-loader to dampen vibration?
A 25 kg concrete block
Alternatives include water-filled plastic counterweights and rings of loose steel balls.
Its hexagonal tub uses about a third of the water of a conventional top-loader.
Q 24Which Whirlpool machine of 2001 was the first high-efficiency washer to load from the top?
Calypso
A rival's Neptune TL top-loader followed in 2003.
Q 25Most modern European front-loaders connect only to which water supply?
Cold
Internal electric heaters raise the temperature, up to 95 °C on some models.
Q 26What did early automatic washers connect to the water supply with?
Slip-on connectors to sink taps
Many early automatics were coin-operated and lived in apartment basements.
Q 27How does LG's troubleshooting feature send diagnostic data from a washer to a phone?
Sound tones
Samsung's version has the user photograph the machine's time display.
Q 28What did Whirlpool's founder Louis Upton do for a living before making washers in 1911?
Sold insurance
He and his uncle Emory added an electric motor to a hand washer design.
Q 29Which retailer made the Upton company its sole washer supplier in 1921?
Sears, Roebuck & Co.
Sears first sold Upton wringer washers under the Allen brand for $54.75.
Q 30Under which brand did Sears sell Whirlpool's automatic spinner-type washer of 1947?
Kenmore
A year later it was sold under the Whirlpool name too.