God bless this woman for inventing what we all love to wear and use today.

[cathdiap]

The Woman Who Invented Disposable Diapers

Today, 95 percent of American babies wear them. But when Marion Donavan tried to find a manufacturer for her idea, the men who controlled the industry brushed her off.
 

 

Marion Donovan, inventor of the first disposable diaper, told Barbara Walters that one simple question guided her work: "What do I think will help a lot of people and most certainly will help me?"

 

The advantage—and the downside—of this philosophy was that when she first started out in the 1940s men controlled manufacturing. And to them, the problems she was fixing might as well not have existed.

These men, one can imagine, had rarely, if ever, changed a baby's diaper. Certainly none of them had been charged with the responsibility of dealing—day in and day out (and late night in and late night out)—not only with soggy strips of cloth, pinned around a baby's bottom, but with soggy sheets and blankets that were soiled, too, when the diapers leaked through.

 

 

Donovan, who was married in 1942 and by 1946 was on her second baby, did have to deal with that. And she had to deal with the terrible rubber "baby pants" that claimed to solve the leakage problem. Those baby pants might not have leaked, but they also gave babies diaper rash and dug into their soft little baby legs and baby bellies.

Donovan was not the sort of person who settled for other people's design failures. First from waterproof shower curtains, later from nylon parachute material, she cut out and sewed together more breathable diaper covers. Then, she had a better idea: She made the cover into a container, into which a baby's caretaker could stuff absorbent paper. She called it the Boater, and she went out to find a manufacturer.

"I went to all the big names that you can think of, and they said, 'We don't want it. No woman has asked us for that. They're very happy and they buy all our baby pants,'" she told Walters in 1975. "So, I went into manufacturing myself."

 

In 1949, the Boater went on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue. Soon, they started selling out. "It is not often that a new innovation in the Infants' Wear field goes over with the immediate success of your Boaters," the president of Saks wrote to her.

That's not hard to imagine: Presumably, it wasn't often that new innovations in Infants' Wear came from the people who actually used them, either. Even Donovan's success with the Boater didn't convince manufacturers that they might want to listen to her. The Boater wasn't fully disposable—you could wash and reuse the nylon part—but when Donovan proposed making a throw-away diaper out of paper, no one she talked to wanted to try.

Today, some 95 percent of babies wear disposable diapers. And according to the EPA, each baby in the United States goes through about 8,000 of them.

 

 

3A28A2FE-D219-4B42-90E2-C215CB165942.webp

[DiaperboyEddie12]

Interesting article!

[Thad]

Indeed, very interesting. The boater sounds alot like a pocket cloth diaper lol.

[igel]

I think the question should be what really is her invention, for diaper covers with buttons already existed at least in the 1880s. So the idea of using buttons can't have been new in the late '40s. Neither are water proof covers made of other materials than rubber anything new, in this advertise from the early '40s or late '30s (it is made before 1942) the diaper cover is made out of batiste (a thin cotton fabric) that is impregnated, guess it can't be too far away from her parachute material. When the WW2 began cellucotton diapers become common in Sweden, how that material was fixed to the diaper cover, I do not know, but in some way it must have been.

  Maybe her great invention actually is the pocket sides, what might be the predecessor to the modern standing leak guards.   

[babykeiff]

This is a very well wrote article, and most here would agree with the sentiment of @cathdiap in thanking Marion Donavan for her invention, but for me, I personally think that she was one of the people that created the 'disposable world' problem that we have today. Yes, she created a solution to the problem with rubber baby pants of the day in the creation of "Boaters" - form fitting pants, but she used first, shower curtains, and then, nylon parashute material. These are non-disposable. Therefore, they can be reused without adding to landfill. The concept of creating a disposable diaper (one that is single use) has a large reaching problem. It is the disposable of the contents and resourses used to create same.

The error is the change from nylon to plastic (PETE, HDPE, PVC, LDPE, PP, PS) where most plastics are artifically created from crude oil. Plastic does eventually break down to smaller versions of the plastic. Today, there is not a place, person or animal on earth that does not have particles of plastic in it.

The concept of a single use diaper that will end in a dump somewhere. By calculation, 8000 diapers over birth-5 years per child, with the 677.94 million children under the age of 5, this calculates as (8000x677.94m) 5,423,520 million dirty diapers per 5 years. 1946 to 2022 = 76 years / 5 = 15 times 5,423,520 million dirty diapers = approx. 81 trillion (81,352,800,000,000) dirty diapers where 95% is placed into landfill.

These figures do not include adult diapers, or other disposable paper products. Look at the amount of oil etc that was used to produce these diapers - even if it was 1 drop of oil per diaper, we still have 81 trillion times that count buried into the ground.

The real reason that manufactures of Donavans era refused to make disposable diapers was more in relation to conversation of resources. 1946 was during the end of WW2, where most business owners had gone through very tight times where that had to do without certain resourses - so makeing an item that would end up in the bin, was not, at that time, a good use of available resources. Soldiers / ex-army people tend to have the 'mend and make do' attitude, not the throw away adn buy another one tomorrow attitude.

Today, we know better, but we live in a disposable world that is now costing us the future - ours and our children - and a disposable diaper as a matter of convenience for us, but a long term cost to the children that we put in them. The race is on to find a transport system that does not use carbon based fuels AND, where the methods are FULLY and COMPLETELY reusable.

Considering the above, is/was Marion Donavon's idea a good one or a bad one?

[dlnoir]

So they should have kept it with cloth diapers and plastic pants. It is not her idea to create disposables she designed / created a solution for babies which is fine if you’d ask me. If they stayed with cloth the number would be much better let’s say five or six plastic pants per child per year. And we are not even talking about the trees they need to cut down for the pulp they use inside. Over the years a number of people warned about the influence of disposables in the environment and they were waved away. When plastics came into the world it was sold to the public as something that would revolutionize the world and it did. Although plastic originally is created out of a waste product of crude oil, waste out of refineries, at the time it looked like a proper solution to do something useful with it. They also learned that it would take like forever to break down and that kind of information was kept silent for as long as they could, much like smoking cigarettes and the addictive properties they have. As usual a number of people got very filthy rich of disposable diapers and the oil they need to produce them. So no I do not think it was Marion Donovans initial idea that caused the massive use of diapers nowadays. But I think all this will change too if the green deal fighters will get there way. They will find a way to punish the public for the goods and products they use and made them filthy rich. While they are flying themselves in privet jets all over the world from one meeting to another to point the finger at us.

[babykeiff]

On 7/26/2022 at 7:14 AM, dlnoir said:

So they should have kept it with cloth diapers and plastic pants. It is not her idea to create disposables she designed / created a solution for babies which is fine if you’d ask me. If they stayed with cloth the number would be much better let’s say five or six plastic pants per child per year. And we are not even talking about the trees they need to cut down for the pulp they use inside. Over the years a number of people warned about the influence of disposables in the environment and they were waved away. When plastics came into the world it was sold to the public as something that would revolutionize the world and it did. Although plastic originally is created out of a waste product of crude oil, waste out of refineries, at the time it looked like a proper solution to do something useful with it. They also learned that it would take like forever to break down and that kind of information was kept silent for as long as they could, much like smoking cigarettes and the addictive properties they have. As usual a number of people got very filthy rich of disposable diapers and the oil they need to produce them. So no I do not think it was Marion Donovans initial idea that caused the massive use of diapers nowadays. But I think all this will change too if the green deal fighters will get there way. They will find a way to punish the public for the goods and products they use and made them filthy rich. While they are flying themselves in privet jets all over the world from one meeting to another to point the finger at us.

Prior to the creation of the 'Boater', the item placed over a diaper was either a wool knitted pant (wool is naturally waterproof) or rubber pants. Everything involved (cloth diaper - wool pant - rubber pant) was reusable. Also, when a baby wet / soiled his / her diaper, it was changed to a clean dry one. This was needed to avoid leekage. The associated results of this was the following -

• babies were out of diapers before they were 2 year old
• nappy rash only existed where the diapers weren't changed often enough = higher level of parental care towards the child.

Nothing else existed that was disposable.

After the creation of the 'Boater', it was realized that there was a demand for certain disposable items. As a result, the 'snowball' effect of create a disposable item to create a demand for the disposable item was started.

Marion Donovan may not have had the idea to create disposable diapers, but she started educated the greedy fools that people would purchase something that would end in a bin. Prior to Marion Donovan's actions, the concept of making something that would end up in a bin was, for the then companies, insanity.