Washing Machines Trivia
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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.
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Q 01Which Swedish statistician called the washing machine the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution?
Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling, in his 2010 TED talk 'The magic washing machine', argued that freeing women from hand-washing outweighed every other invention of the Industrial Revolution.
Q 02In which country was Jacob Christian Schäffer's washing machine design published in 1767?
Germany
Jacob Christian Schäffer, a Lutheran clergyman and naturalist in Regensburg, Germany, published his washing-machine design there in 1767.
Q 03Who received a British patent for a rotating drum washer in 1782?
Henry Sidgier
Henry Sidgier's 1782 British patent described a rotating drum of wooden rods turned by a handle; in the 1790s Edward Beetham sold numerous 'patent washing mills' across England.
Q 04Who was granted the first US patent titled Clothes Washing, in 1797?
Nathaniel Briggs
Nathaniel Briggs of New Hampshire was granted the patent in 1797, seven years after the first US Patent Act of 1790; no description of his machine survives.
Q 05Which Canadian patented a Clothes Washer With Wringer Rolls in 1843?
John E. Turnbull
John E. Turnbull of Saint John, New Brunswick, patented the 'Clothes Washer With Wringer Rolls' in 1843, pairing a washing tub with rollers that squeezed water from the clothes.
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
Newspaper advertisements for electric washing machines appeared as early as 1904, although the identity of the first inventor of the electric washer is unknown.
Q 08Alva Fisher is often wrongly credited with inventing which appliance?
The powered washer
Alva J. Fisher's 1910 US patent 966,677 for the Thor electric washer is often called the first powered washer, but the Patent Office shows at least one earlier electric-washer patent.
Q 09In 1874, William Blackstone of Indiana built a hand-cranked washing machine as a gift for whom?
His wife
Blackstone built the machine as a birthday present for his wife, then began selling copies for $2.50 each, one of the first home washers made in America.
Q 10What share of the 25 million electrically wired US homes had an electric washer by 1940?
60%
By 1940 about 60% of the 25 million wired US homes had an electric washer, up from under a million machines sold a year in the late 1920s.
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
Bendix's 1953 Duomatic was the first washer-dryer combination, washing and then tumble-drying the load in a single front-loading drum.
Q 21Which company introduced direct-drive brushless motors to washing machines in 1991?
Fisher & Paykel
Fisher & Paykel's 1991 SmartDrive top-loader drove the drum directly with an electronically controlled brushless DC motor, dispensing with belts, clutches and gearboxes.
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
Rolls Razor, run by salesman John Bloom, sold cheap twin tubs door to door in the early 1960s before the company collapsed in 1964.
Q 16What is the smaller tub of a twin tub machine actually for?
Spinning clothes dry
The smaller tub is a perforated drum for spinning clothes dry: centrifugal force wrings the water out, while the larger tub washes with an agitator at its base.
Q 17Which design dominated the UK by the 1970s, when automatics finally took over?
Front-loading drum
Front-loading drum automatics took over British homes in the 1970s, fitting under a standard kitchen counter and replacing the twin tubs of the 1960s.
Q 18Which design has been dominant in the United States and Canada?
Vertical-axis with a lid
Vertical-axis top-loaders with a lid have long dominated the US and Canada; a central agitator turns clothes through the water in a tub that fills completely.
Q 19What did Hoover trademark as the Pulsator on its Hoovermatic machines?
A side-mounted impeller
The Pulsator was a side-mounted impeller disc that spun in one direction, dragging clothes around a toroidal path instead of the back-and-forth of a central agitator.
Q 20What is typically hidden inside a residential front-loader to dampen vibration?
A 25 kg concrete block
A concrete block of roughly 25 kg is bolted to the tub of most front-loaders to counterweight the spinning drum; some makers use water-filled plastic counterweights instead.
The Staber System 2000 is a top-loading horizontal-axis washer: its hexagonal drum turns on a horizontal axle yet loads through a lid, using about a third of a conventional top-loader's water.
Q 24Which Whirlpool machine of 2001 was the first high-efficiency washer to load from the top?
Calypso
Whirlpool's 2001 Calypso was the first top-loading high-efficiency washer, replacing the agitator with a nutating 'wash plate' that bounced clothes through a shallow pool of water.
Q 25Most modern European front-loaders connect only to which water supply?
Cold
Most European front-loaders are cold-fill only, heating water with an internal element; some models reach 90 or 95 °C on a cottons boil wash.
Q 26What did early automatic washers connect to the water supply with?
Slip-on connectors to sink taps
Early automatics drew water through temporary slip-on connectors pushed onto sink taps; permanent plumbed-in hot and cold connections came later.
Q 27How does LG's troubleshooting feature send diagnostic data from a washer to a phone?
Sound tones
LG's Smart Diagnosis plays a burst of sound tones that the phone app, or a call-centre system, decodes into fault codes; Samsung's Smart Care has the user photograph the display instead.
Q 28What did Whirlpool's founder Louis Upton do for a living before making washers in 1911?
Sold insurance
Lou Upton had sold insurance before he and his uncle Emory, a machinist, founded the Upton Machine Company in St. Joseph, Michigan, in 1911 to build motor-driven wringer washers.
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
Sears sold the 1947 machine under its Kenmore brand; in 1948 the maker began selling it under its own Whirlpool name, which became the corporate name in 1950.