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60 free Vacuum Cleaners trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This vacuum cleaners trivia quiz covers the machine that turned housework upside down, from horse-drawn suction engines to robots that map your living room. The easy questions handle why Britons say 'hoover', who built the bagless cyclone, when the Roomba appeared and which brand gave the world a vacuum with a smiling face. From there it moves into the inventors: the janitor with an asthma problem and a pillowcase, the engineer who sucked dust through a handkerchief in a restaurant, and the salesman who merged a motor firm with a lamp maker to create Electrolux. The harder end is for tinkerers and trivia-night regulars: the price of Hoover's Model O, the number of Dyson prototypes, the country where the G-Force was first sold, the EU wattage cap, the physics of suction and airwatts, the artist who put new vacuums in glass cases, and the promotion that sank Hoover in Britain. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on vacuum cleaners and the companies and inventors involved, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our inventions, household appliances and technology quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the UK and Ireland, vacuum cleaners are commonly called what, after a brand name that became generic?
Hoovers
The Hoover Company was one of the first and most influential makers, and 'to hoover' is used as a verb.
Q 02The first manual vacuum cleaner, using bellows, was invented in 1860 by Daniel Hess in which US state?
Iowa
Hess lived in West Union; eight years later Ives McGaffey patented a hand-cranked rival in Chicago.
Q 03What was the name of the early hand-cranked vacuum cleaner patented in Chicago in 1868?
Whirlwind
Its inventor, Ives W. McGaffey, produced what is often called the first portable sweeping machine.
Q 04Which British engineer built the horse-drawn 'Puffing Billy' suction cleaner in 1901?
Hubert Cecil Booth
He tested his idea by sucking through a handkerchief laid on a restaurant chair and looking at the dirt on the other side.
Q 05The Puffing Billy's inventor designed which fairground attractions for London, Blackpool, Paris and Vienna?
Ferris wheels
He also designed suspension bridges and factories, and was once fined for frightening horses with his noisy machines.
Q 06The Puffing Billy's motorised successor cleaned Westminster Abbey's carpets before whose 1901 coronation?
Edward VII
His company's vans parked outside buildings and fed hoses through the windows to reach every room.
Q 07How did the Puffing Billy's inventor test his suction idea after seeing a blowing machine at a music hall?
Sucking through a handkerchief on a chair
Seeing the dust trapped on the underside convinced him that filtered suction, not blowing, was the answer.
Q 08What colour were the vans of the British Vacuum Cleaner Company, which fed hoses through windows?
Bright red
The firm, set up in 1901 to market the Puffing Billy, was the first to print the phrase 'vacuum cleaner' in a prospectus.
Q 09James Murray Spangler, who invented the first portable electric vacuum in 1907, worked as what?
A department store janitor
He was asthmatic and suspected his carpet sweeper was making him ill, so he added an electric fan motor, a soap box and a pillowcase.
Q 10What did Spangler use as the dust bag on his prototype Electric Suction Sweeper?
One of his wife's pillowcases
The dirt was blown by an electric fan into a soap box, and a rotating brush loosened debris from the carpet.
Q 11William Henry Hoover, who bought Spangler's patent in 1908, was a manufacturer of what?
Leather goods
He gave the machine a steel casing, casters and attachments; his company was renamed the Hoover Company in 1922.
Q 12Hoover's first vacuum, the 1908 Model O, sold for how much?
$60
That is roughly $2,150 in 2025 money; the company sold 372 of them by the end of the year.
Q 13How was Spangler related to the man who bought his patent?
The buyer's wife was his cousin
He gave one of his sweepers to his cousin Susan Troxel Hoover, who used it at home and showed her husband.
Q 21Which Danish company was the first in continental Europe to sell vacuum cleaners, in 1910?
Fisker and Nielsen
Their machine weighed just 17.5 kg and could be operated by one person; the German firm Vorwerk followed in the 1930s with direct sales.
Q 22James Kirby's first vacuum, the 1906 'Domestic Cyclone', separated dirt using what?
A water bath
Kirby machines are still built in Cleveland, Ohio, and are famous for being sold through in-home demonstrations.
Q 23Kirby's parent company, Scott Fetzer, was bought in 1986 by which investor's conglomerate?
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway
Q 14Hoover's beater bar, introduced in 1919, was sold with which slogan?
It beats as it sweeps as it cleans
Disposable filter bags followed in the 1920s and an upright model in 1926.
Q 15Which Hoover product of 1930 is described as the world's first handheld vacuum cleaner?
Dustette
Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss was hired in the early 1930s to modernise the whole Hoover range.
Q 16Hoover's Constellation, introduced in 1954, was unusual because it did what instead of rolling on wheels?
Floated on its own exhaust air
It worked like a small hovercraft and was so quiet that Hoover re-released an updated version in 2006.
Q 17Hoover's disastrous 1992 British 'free flights' promotion led to the sale of Hoover Europe to whom?
Candy
Demand overwhelmed the offer, court action followed in 1993, and the Italian firm was in turn bought by Haier in 2018.
Q 18Hoover North America was sold in 2007 by Whirlpool to which Hong Kong manufacturer?
Techtronic Industries
The $107 million deal split the American brand from Hoover Europe, which is now part of Haier.
Q 19Which Swedish company launched its Model V in 1921, a cleaner that lay flat on two thin metal runners?
Electrolux
Its name came from a 1919 merger of a motor maker with a lamp company called Lux.
Q 20Electrolux's name combines Elektromekaniska with Lux, a company that originally made what?
Kerosene lamps
Salesman Axel Wenner-Gren brought the two together and became the majority shareholder and president.
Buffett called Scott Fetzer the prototype of the kind of acquisition he liked; Ivan Boesky had bid $420 million two years earlier.
Q 24Who developed the bagless cyclonic vacuum after a Hoover Junior lost suction?
James Dyson
He built more than 5,000 prototypes over five years before anything reached the market.
Q 25Roughly how many prototypes did Dyson build before launching his first cyclonic cleaner in 1983?
5,127
His wife's salary as an art teacher helped keep the project going.
Q 26In which country was Dyson's pink G-Force cleaner launched by catalogue when no UK firm would touch it?
Japan
British manufacturers feared it would wreck the lucrative market for replacement dust bags; it sold for about $2,000.
Q 27Where did Dyson get the idea for cyclonic dirt separation?
A sawmill
Large cyclones there pull sawdust out of extracted air; he built a 30-foot version for his Ballbarrow factory first.
Q 28Dyson's first original invention was a wheelbarrow that replaced the wheel with what?
A ball
The Ballbarrow was featured on the BBC's Tomorrow's World; he later reused the ball idea in his vacuum cleaners.
Q 29Dyson's DC01, released in the UK in 1993 for £200, became the best-selling vacuum in how long?
18 months
By 2001 it held 47% of the upright market, despite critics saying nobody would pay double the price of a normal cleaner.
Q 30In which Wiltshire town was the Dyson company founded in 1991?
Malmesbury
Vacuum production later moved to Malaysia, and a second campus opened on the old RAF Hullavington airfield nearby.