With everything we’ve sent through the pipeline in 15 years of Bathroom Readers, it’s amazing that we’ve never gotten around to telling the story of the disposable diaper. Here it is at last.
One afternoon in the late 1940s, a young mother named Marion Donovan changed her daughter’s cloth diaper… only to see the baby wet the new diaper, her clothes, and her crib bedding all over again just a few minutes later. Traditional cloth diapers weren’t like modern disposable diapers—the wetness and goo immediately soaked through, soiling everything the baby came in contact with. Rubber baby pants could be used to hold in the moisture, but they caused terrible diaper rash because they didn’t allow the baby’s skin to breathe.
There weren’t any other solutions…until Donovan glanced over at her waterproof shower curtain and something clicked. She realized the curtain material would make an excellent outer cover for cloth diapers. If the cover was made properly, it would hold in moisture but would also breathe better than rubber, preventing diaper rash. She cut out a piece of the shower curtain, took it to her sewing machine, and started sewing.
It took Donovan three years (and a lot of shower curtains) to perfect her design for waterproof diaper covers. She ended up switching to nylon parachute cloth instead of shower curtains. She also added snaps, so that mothers didn’t have to worry about sticking their babies with safety pins.
Donovan jokingly named her diaper covers Boaters—since the covers didn’t leak they kept babies “afloat”—and she convinced Saks Fifth Avenue to begin carrying them in 1949. They were an immense hit, and in 1951 Donovan sold the rights to her diaper covers for $1 million.
Trying to call a ship in the eastern Atlantic? Use area code 871. Western Atlantic? Try 874.
But she wasn’t done yet. Donovan then came up with the idea that turned out to be the Holy Grail of modern motherhood: diapers made from absorbant paper instead of cloth, allowing them to be thrown away instead of washed and reused.
So are today’s disposable diapers direct descendants of Donovan’s idea? Nope—when Donovan went around to the big paper companies and tried to get them interested in paper diapers, they all thought she was nuts.
Disposable diapers had to wait until 1959, when a Procter & Gamble employee named Vic Mills invented his own disposable diaper for his grandson, apparently without even knowing that Donovan had beaten him to the task by nearly a decade. It was Mills’s diaper, not Donovan’s, that P&G introduced as “Pampers” in 1961.
No matter—Donovan was number one, and she’s the person historians credit as the inventor of the world’s first disposable diaper.
In September 1864, Civil War General Nathan Forrest was leading his Confederate troops north from Alabama toward Tennessee. He planned to attack the Union post in Athens, Alabama, having heard that Union reinforcements were approaching and wanted to take the fort before they arrived. The problem: the post was well manned and heavily fortified. Forrest was greatly outnumbered, but he had a plan.
He sent a message to Union commander Campbell requesting a personal meeting. Campbell agreed to the meeting. Forrest then escorted Campbell on a tour of the Confederate troops, during which Campbell silently calculated the number of troops and artillery surrounding his fort. What he didn’t realize was that Forrest’s men—after being inspected and tallied—were quietly packing everything up and quickly moving to a new position, to be counted again. Campbell was seeing the same troops over and over again. Assuming he was vastly outnumbered by the Confederates, he returned to his fort, pulled down the Union flag and gave up without a fight.
What was Thomas Jefferson doing when he wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence? Drinking beer. In a tavern