When were diapers invented
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Summary: A type of diaper has been in use since ancient times though it would have borne little relation to anything used today. In the Middle East around the time of Christ babies the diapers were a type of swaddling cloth made of skin. The word diaper originally referred to the type of cloth that was used. Diaper was used to describe a small geometric pattern and later came to describe the fiber with this pattern in the USA and Canada. In Britain diapers are referred to as nappies, and this word is generally presumed to be short for a napkin.
The disposable diaper product which is available under many brand names but perhaps the best known is Pampers is a relatively new invention in the world of diapers. From the start of the 1800’s until just after the Second World War all diapers were made of an absorbent linen or cotton material. Terrylene was the trademark of a synthetic produced by the British chemical company ICI and has nothing to do with the terry toweling diapers, although in Britain cloth diapers were known as “terry” nappies. The diaper was in fact a geometric fabric pattern, referring to the type of cloth in America as well.
Not surprisingly at the start of the last Century a laundry service for diapers was very popular and diaper services became all the rage at least for those that could afford them. The first absorbent pad to be used as a disposable diaper was invented in 1942 by Pauli Ström in Sweden; he made it from unbleached creped cellulose tissue. According to Wikipedia these early disposable diapers had the capacity to hold 100cc of urine, which was roughly one wetting. Although this was cumbersome it was certainly an improvement on the cotton variety because there was no laundering, no sterilizing of diapers and no mess. It does not compare with the new technology available today, but it was a disposable diaper, at least of sorts.
The next inventor was a woman an architect and inventor Marion Donovan her innovation was a revamped material diaper, wrapped in a shower curtain (1946)). Today that is of course a joke, but to the women of the sixties it must have seen as though all their Christmases had come at once not to have to sterilize diapers, just toss then in the trash. Who could blame those women for not looking too hard at the environmental cost of disposable diapers? Most people today who take the moral high ground on this issue are men. Her first attempt was a conventional material diaper encased in what she called a “boater”. Essentially this was a shower curtain wrapped around the material to stop leaks.
By 1950 the first diaper was invented that was not fastened by pins but had a snap on fastener. It was at this point that technology and design leapt forward with leaps and bounds in the diaper market. The next giant step forward in the diaper industry was made by Vic Mills who worked for Proctor and Gamble but he was looking for a less messy way to diaper his granddaughter. The invention that he was striving for was an absorbent but disposable material. He rejected Solos and Larks as possible brand names and in 1961 he selected the brand name of “Pampers”.
The success of Pampers was assured because at last a cheap effective disposable diaper/nappy was born! Despite the fact that these early prototype were massively bulky and cumbersome because they hade three layers a pulpy absorbent material, a rayon topsheet, and a polythene back sheet to absorb any extra leaks. Incredibly the supermarkets, and drug stores had no idea to how to market these product and no two supermarkets had them in the same place. But the treasure for diapers did not stop desperate mums from grabbing them and making them the brand leaders overnight.
By the seventies there were not that many innovations from Proctor and Gamble they had added a range of different sizes and absorbencies, but their main go faster stripe was the advent of sticky adhesive tape to close the nappy rather than the enormous pin. The combination of squirming infant and large sharp pin had always been a hazard for any parent and this safety clip was a giant step forward to a safer diaper for both babies and parents’.
In 1976 “Luvs” had designed a nappy that was shaped, rather like an hourglass and within a few years that shape had become the standard diaper shape in the industry and the idea had been copied within the industry. Inventors and patents may not have been thick and fast within the industry, but the product certainly had a profound effect on mothers’. In the 1990’s there was a short lived phase of gender specific diapers, but that trend had all but died out at the close of the decade.
During the 1990’s the cloth or material came back, metaphorically to bite the makers of disposable diapers on the bottom. They became popular because of the concerns about disposable diapers on the environment. In a world where landfill spaces were running out disposable diapers created a lot of trash. However paradoxically it was not so much the environmental issues, as the fact that the cloth nappy was now a designer diaper, that was customizable that made the big impact.
The new millennium saw the dawn of older types of cloth nappies gaining in popularity. Cotton Babies manufactured a cloth diaper irreverently named the bumGenius. Inventors had become full circle, they had produced a designer one size fits all stretchy material diaper with sticky tape.
