I have a child and a toddler. I can't go anywhere without diapers. They are in my laptop bag and my husband's briefcase, in my mountaineering backpack, hidden in all suitcases, hidden in the gloves of every car I borrowed. They are the common characteristics of parents, and I almost never thought what life would be like without them. But until the middle of the 2th century, changing a baby's diaper meant folding and nailing a towel, and then pulling on a pair of rubber pants.
in the late 194s, a woman named marion Donovan changed all this. She invented a new diaper, a plastic cover like an envelope with an absorbable insert on it. Her invention was patented in 1951 and earned a net profit of $1 million (nearly $1 million today), paving the way for the development of disposable diapers as we know them today. Donovan will continue to be one of the most prolific female inventors of her time. Her mother died when she was a child, and her father, an engineer and inventor, encouraged her to innovate. She invented a new type of dentifrice in primary school. After graduating from college, she worked as an editor in a women's magazine in new york before she got married and settled in Connecticut.
There, as a young mother tired of changing wet sheets, Donovan had her lightning moment. In her view, cloth diapers "can play a more wick role than sponges", while rubber pants can cause diaper rash. So she decided to do something better. She pulled down the shower curtain, cut it into pieces and sewed it on a waterproof diaper cover with snaps instead of safety pins. This creates a diaper cover made of breathable parachute cloth, which has an insert that can absorb the diaper panel. Donovan named it "Boater". Marion Donovan's "diaper packaging" was patented on June 12th, 1951 (U.S. Pat. No.2,556,8)
The manufacturer was not interested in it. As Donovan told Barbara walters in 1975:
"I went to all the big names you can think of and they said,' We don't want them. No woman asked us for this. They were very happy. They bought all our baby pants. "So, I did it myself."
In 1949, she started selling this wild boar on Saks Fifth Avenue, where it immediately became very popular. Two years later, she sold her company and patent right to Keke Company for $1 million. Donovan once considered developing a diaper with absorbent paper, but executives at that time were allegedly not interested. Pampers, the first mass-produced disposable diaper, was not put on the market until 1961.
This ship is not the end of Donovan's invention. She also obtained a total of ***2 patents, from zipper drawstring to skirt with back zipper, to boxed checks and record books, to a new flossing device, boating advertisement (Marion O'Brien Donovan Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History? Smithsonian institution
After Donovan died in 1998, her children donated her papers to the archive center of Smithsonian National History Museum; The acquisition is part of the Modern Inventor Documentation Program of Mei Sen Research Center for Invention and Innovation. These 17 boxes of cultural relics include notes, drawings, patents, customer orders, advertisements, newspaper articles, scrapbooks, personal documents and photos. Alison Oswald, archivist of Lemelson Center, said that these collections are often used by scholars, mainly those who study the history of women or technology. Oswald said:
"Her collection is quite comprehensive for female inventors in this period." We are really lucky. Her family saved a lot of money like them, because the record of invention may be very fragmentary.
Donovan's daughter Christie.