Cleaning Trivia
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209 free Cleaning trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 209 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
Babylon was making soap-like materials by about 2800 BC, and the recipe that survives from the region is simple: fats or oils boiled with wood ashes.
Q 02What is the name of the chemical reaction that turns fats and an alkali such as lye into soap?
Saponification
Saponification turns fat and alkali into soap and glycerol, and it fights fires too: wet-chemical kitchen extinguishers work by converting burning cooking oil into a non-combustible soapy foam.
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 as cut, wrapped bars; its success gave a name to Port Sunlight, the model village Lever Brothers began building for its factory workers in 1888.
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
Heavy-duty synthetic detergent was a goal P&G had all but given up: managers told chemist Dick Byerly to drop the work, known as Project X, but he kept at it quietly for years until it became Tide.
Q 07Synthetic detergents were first developed in Germany in World War I due to a shortage of what?
Oils and fats for soap
Oils and fats for soap ran short in blockaded Germany and were wanted for other uses, so chemists built cleaners from naphthalene instead; the first, sold as Nekal, washed only fairly but wetted textiles well.
Q 08Before chemical bleach arrived in the 1780s, linen was whitened over several months by laying it outdoors in what?
Sunshine
Sunshine did the work on 'bleachfields', where cloth lay for up to six months; once Claude Berthollet's chemical bleach arrived in the 1780s, the same job took hours.
Q 09The first commercial bleach was named 'Eau de Javel' after a borough near which city?
Paris
Paris has since swallowed Javel, the riverside village where the bleach works stood, and the name outlived it: French speakers still call household bleach 'eau de Javel'.
Q 10Clorox bleach takes its name from chlorine and which other ingredient?
Sodium hydroxide
Sodium hydroxide supplies the '-ox': the name joins the bleach's two main ingredients. Annie Murray then built demand by giving away sample bottles at her family's grocery in Oakland.
Q 11From 1929, Domestos's door-to-door salesmen in Newcastle did what at each house?
Refilled the jar
Refilled the jar: Wilfred Handley sold his bleach in big brown jars that salesmen topped up from hand carts and bicycle carts; Lever Brothers bought the firm 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 13Which odour-trapping molecule is the active ingredient in Febreze?
Cyclodextrin
Q 21Which German company made Europe's first electric domestic dishwasher in 1929?
Miele
Miele built Europe's first electric dishwasher in 1929; the firm had started out thirty years earlier making cream separators and butter churns.
Q 22Which 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 23America's first self-service laundry, opened in Fort Worth in 1934, traded under which name?
Washateria
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 14Which 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 15James Murray Spangler, who patented the first portable electric vacuum in 1908, had what department-store job?
A caretaker
A caretaker, or janitor, at a Canton department store, Spangler was asthmatic and blamed the dust his carpet sweeper raised, so he built a suction cleaner from a fan motor, a soap box and a pillowcase.
Q 16Spangler sold his patent to a local maker of what, whose name became Britain's verb for vacuuming?
Leather goods
Leather goods were William Hoover's trade, and with cars threatening his horse-harness business he wanted a new line; Spangler's cousin Susan, Hoover's wife, tried the machine at home and urged him to buy in.
Q 17About how many prototypes did James Dyson build before his bagless vacuum cleaner went on sale?
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 18Where did James Dyson first launch his bagless cleaner after every UK manufacturer refused it?
Japan
Japan got the G-Force first, sold by catalogue in bright pink, because British makers feared a bagless cleaner would kill their trade in replacement dust bags; it won a design prize there in 1991.
Q 19Before the Roomba, iRobot built its PackBot robots for which customer?
The US military
The US military used iRobot's PackBot for bomb disposal in Iraq and Afghanistan; after the Roomba arrived in September 2002 the firm turned to the home, and in 2016 it sold its military business.
Q 20What was Josephine Cochrane's motivation for inventing the dishwasher?
Servants kept chipping her good china
Servants kept chipping her good china, so the Illinois socialite built a machine that cleaned it more gently; she showed nine of them at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where hotels and restaurants took notice.
Washateria blended 'wash' with 'cafeteria', the cheap self-service eating places of the day; Texans kept the word, where Britons say launderette.
Q 24Which 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 25Short of cash in 1913, the inventors of Brillo pads paid their patent lawyer, Milton Loeb, with what?
A stake in the business
A stake in the business was all the cookware peddler and his jeweller brother-in-law could offer; Loeb took it and secured the patent under the name Brillo, just as easily blackened aluminium pans were filling kitchens.
Q 26Ettore Steccone named the single-blade window squeegee he patented in 1936 after which US political programme?
The New Deal
The New Deal was the name Steccone gave his 1936 design, made of light brass with a sharp, flexible rubber blade; built at first in his garage, it replaced the bulky two-bladed 'Chicago squeegee'.
Q 27Ostrich-feather dusters were developed in 1903 in which city?
Johannesburg
Johannesburg is where missionary and broom-factory manager Harry S. Beckner found in 1903 that ostrich feathers were handy for cleaning his machines, and wound them onto broom handles; earlier American dusters used turkey feathers.
Q 28Which religious community invented the flat broom-corn broom and the broom vice?
The Shakers
Shaker brother Theodore Bates of Watervliet, New York, clamped round broom-corn bundles flat in a vice around 1798, giving a wider, more efficient sweep that the Shakers then sold widely.
Q 29The word 'mop', spelled 'mappe' in the 15th century, may derive from a Latin word meaning what?
Napkin
Napkin, or cloth, is the sense of Latin 'mappa', the probable root of 'mop'; the same word gave English 'map', because early maps were drawn on cloth.
Q 30The word 'janitor' comes from the Latin 'ianitor', meaning what?
Doorkeeper
A Latin 'ianitor' was a doorkeeper, from 'ianua', a door; the same root gives January, the month named for Janus, the two-faced god of doorways.