Washing Machines Trivia
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45 free Washing Machines trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 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 45 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
Hans Rosling made the case in his 2010 TED talk 'The magic washing machine': once a machine did the wash, a day of drudgery became time for reading.
Q 02In which country did a pastor and naturalist publish an early washing machine design in 1767?
Germany
Germany: Jacob Christian Schäffer, a pastor in Regensburg, published the design in 1767; he also spent years testing how to make paper from plants instead of rags.
Q 03Which old laundry tool is also played as a rhythm instrument in zydeco, skiffle and jug bands?
The washboard
The washboard: players tap or scrape its corrugated metal with thimbles, and zydeco musicians wear a frameless version, the frottoir, hung from the shoulders.
Q 04What powered Maytag's Multi-Motor washer, sold to farm families in the 1910s?
A gasoline engine
A gasoline engine: most rural homes had no electricity then, and Maytag sold attachments that let the same machine grind meat as well.
Q 05The washing machine brand Beko, widely sold across Europe, was founded in which country?
Turkey
Turkey: Beko began in Istanbul in the 1950s and takes its name from the first letters of its founders' surnames, Bejerano and Koç.
Q 06Which religious community produced the Improved Washing Machine registered in 1858?
The Shakers
The Shakers: mechanic Nicholas Bennett is credited with the wash mill at Mount Lebanon, New York, and the Canterbury, New Hampshire, community patented it in 1858 and sold it.
Q 07Which Norse god gave his name to an early electric washing machine built in Chicago?
Thor
Thor: from about 1907 Chicago's Hurley Machine Company put the thunder god's name on its electric washer, whose motor did the cranking that earlier machines left to the user.
Q 08Which tech founder said his family spent two weeks debating which washing machine to buy?
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs told Wired in 1996 that the dinner-table debate ended with a Miele washer and dryer, and that they thrilled him more than any piece of high tech had in years.
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 10The word detergent comes from a Latin verb with which meaning?
To wipe away
To wipe away: Latin detergere joins de, 'off', and tergere, 'to wipe', and English has used the word since the early 1600s, long before washing powders existed.
Q 11Which company introduced the first domestic automatic washing machine in 1937?
Bendix Home Appliances
Bendix Home Appliances was a separate South Bend firm that paid to use the name of Bendix, the aircraft and car-parts maker, which never built a washing machine itself.
Q 12Why did the first 1937 automatic washer have to be anchored to the floor?
It had no drum suspension
It had no drum suspension, so in the spin the machine would 'walk' across the floor unless it was bolted down.
Q 13What did the Hoover Keymatic use to program different wash cycles?
Plastic cartridges with slots
Q 21Which unlikely liquid did ancient Roman laundries use as a cleaning agent for cloth?
Stale urine
Stale urine supplied ammonia, an alkali that dissolved the grease in cloth as the workers trampled it underfoot.
Q 22Most modern European washing machines connect only to which water supply?
Cold
Cold: most modern machines are cold-fill only and heat the water themselves with an electric element, so the second, hot-water hose of older models has gone.
Q 23How were early automatic washers usually hooked up to the water supply?
Slip-on connectors to sink taps
Slip-on connectors to sink taps were a temporary hook-up, pushed on for the wash; permanent plumbed-in connections became the norm later.
Plastic cartridges with slots were pushed into the machine, where a mechanical reader felt the slots and ridges along the edge and ran the matching wash cycle.
Q 14Which cheap brand helped make twin tub machines briefly popular in the UK in the 1960s?
Rolls Razor
Rolls Razor, run by John Bloom, sold twin tubs direct through newspaper coupons at about half the shop price, until the company collapsed in 1964.
Q 15What is the smaller tub of a twin tub machine actually for?
Spinning clothes dry
Spinning clothes dry is the smaller tub's job: it is a drum that turns fast enough to fling the water out, while the larger tub does the washing.
Q 16Which 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 17Which design has been dominant in the United States and Canada?
Vertical-axis with a lid
Vertical-axis with a lid: when American makers rushed out automatic washers in the late 1940s, most chose top-loaders, and the layout stuck.
Q 18What did Hoover trademark as the Pulsator on its Hoovermatic machines?
A side-mounted impeller
A side-mounted impeller: the Pulsator spun fast on the tub wall and whipped up a current that dragged the clothes through the water, in place of a central agitator.
Q 19What is typically hidden inside a residential front-loader to dampen vibration?
A 25 kg concrete block
A 25 kg concrete block is bolted to the tub of many front-loaders to hold the machine steady in the spin; engineers have proposed a hollow plastic weight, filled with water after delivery, so machines ship lighter.
Q 20What was unusual about the washing machine James Dyson launched in 2000?
It had two counter-spinning drums
It had two counter-spinning drums: Dyson's ContraRotator turned them in opposite directions, claiming a faster, cleaner wash, but it was costly to build and was dropped in 2005.
Q 24How 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 25What did Whirlpool's founder Louis Upton do for a living before making washers in 1911?
Sold insurance
He sold insurance until a failed investment left him holding the patent for a hand-operated washer, which his uncle Emory, a machinist, fitted with an electric motor.
Q 26Which retailer made the Upton company its sole supplier of washing machines in the 1920s?
Sears, Roebuck & Co.
Sears, Roebuck & Co. had sold Upton's wringer washers by mail order since 1916, and the orders grew so fast that Upton merged with another washer maker in 1929 to keep up.
Q 27Under which store brand did Whirlpool's automatic spinner-type washer go on sale in 1947?
Kenmore
Kenmore came first: a year later the maker sold the same machine under its own new Whirlpool brand, and that brand later became the company's name as well.
Q 28Which brands did Whirlpool acquire in its 2006 Maytag deal?
Jenn-Air and Amana
Jenn-Air and Amana came with Maytag in 2006, along with Magic Chef and Admiral; by the end of 2007 Whirlpool had closed Maytag's Iowa headquarters and its washer plant there.
Q 29In which Iowa town did Frederick Maytag and his partners start their company in 1893?
Newton
Newton, Iowa: the firm began with threshing-machine feeders, and Maytag built his first washer in 1907 to keep the factory busy in the slow season.
Q 30What was the name of the idle repairman character in Maytag advertisements?
Ol' Lonely
Ol' Lonely, first played by Jesse White and later by Gordon Jump of WKRP in Cincinnati, sat idle because Maytag machines supposedly never broke down.