Inventor: Marion Donovan

Marion Donovan was born on October 15th, 1917 in Fort Wayne (USA). She came from an inventive family, because her father and uncle invented an industrial machine for cutting automobile gears and guns. As a child, she spent a lot of time watching her father and uncle at work. Years later, after World War II, she was a housewife and a mother of two babies in Connecticut. She got fed up spending the entire day changing the babies’ wet nappies and the wet bed, time and time again. So she decided to make a nappy that could absorb water to keep her babies dry. Donovan sat down at her sewing machine with a shower curtain and created a waterproof nappy cover. Donovan improved her invention, adding snap fasteners instead of safety pins to close the nappy. Donovan called her nappy cover the “Boater” and explained that “at the time I thought that it looked like a boat.” No manufacturers were interested in her invention, so Donovan sold the nappies at the famous shop ‘Saks Fifth Avenue’ in 1949. Thousands of people bought the ‘boater’ and Donovan received a patent in 1951 and sold the rights to Keko Corporation for one million dollars. Her next project was a ‘disposable diaper’ (nappy) that absorbed water but which mothers could throw away after use. Again, she had problems finding an interested manufacturer, but in 1961, the inventor Victor Mills used Donovan’s vision to create the famous nappies ‘Pampers’. Nowadays, 40 million disposable nappies are used in the USA every day, and in the world, 1,300 million! Young parents’ lives have been made much easier by Marion Donovan’s vision.