PluggedandPadded said:
Heard. I’ll specify by saying nothing prior to 20ish years ago interests me. I’m still learning from you though so I won’t pretend I knew it all. 60 years is a lot longer than I would have guessed
Back home now so can fit a longer reply.
Yeah they actually have been around longer than I thought when I first looked into it, I knew they were around in the 80's but right back to the 60's was news to me at first.
Small history lesson for those interested.
Marion Donovan, is credited with creating the first (non rubber pant) reusable diaper cover in 1946, known as the "Boater" made from an old shower curtain cut and sewn with a place for an insert to create a semi adjustable 2 part diaper system. Until then Diapers were basically all made from cloth sheets folded and pinned onto the baby with either rubber pull up pants or pure lanolised wool "soaker" pants to help prevent the diaper wicking onto clothing/furniture.
This new system allowed parents to use a simple pad (or fold a square of diaper material into a pad) to place inside and then tie onto the baby. She did also invent a disposable paper diaper but was unable to market it so it flopped and came to nothing. Later versions of this after the idea took off used parachute material, this was much more comfortable than rubber and less prone to irritation and diaper rash while remaining waterproof.
About a year later a Scottish woman named
Valerie Hunter Gordon began developing "Paddi" which was a 2 part diaper system similar to Donovan's and using the same parachute material except the outer wrap was fully adjustable and used press studs/snaps to hold it together. The other big difference was that rather than using a cloth pad inside, the Paddi used a disposable pad made from cellulose wadding covered in cotton wool.
She had some trouble at first getting it sold but once they found a production company and made a deal with Boots in the UK (UK's biggest chemist/drug store chain) it became very successful up until the late 50's where the first all in one disposable systems came to market.
J&J had the first commercially available AIO disposable in about 1948 but it's design was not quite right and didn't take off as well as hoped, in 1956 P&G began researching disposable diaper ideas and in 1961 released the first ever design for Pampers to the public. This design took off immediately and became very popular.
Over the next few decades a very heated fight between Proctor and Gamble's Pampers and Kimberly Clark's Huggies led to drastic redesigns and the rapid evolution of the disposable diaper into the forms that we know and love today, changes such as adding double gussets, refastenable tapes, hourglass/contour shapes, ADL layers, odour control, elasticated waist and wings, one way "stay dry" lining, better core materials etc.
And most notably sometime between 1981 and 1984 the introduction and first use of sodium polyacrylate (super absorbent polymers or SAP) in a diaper, this stuff has been around since 1966 but took nearly 20 years to be used in a diaper. They have continued to evolve and new features added over the years since but this has been the last change that made a really big impact on how well the diapers worked.
