Marion O'Brien Donovan: Inventor of the Disposable Diaper…and 19 other Inventions

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

Like many famous inventors, Marion Donovan was originally mocked for her most significant invention. But through her own ingenuity and persistence, she helped spearhead a domestic infant care revolution by inventing the forerunner of the disposable diaper.

It was a new kind of diaper, an envelope-like plastic cover with an absorbent insert. Her invention, patented in 1951, netted her a million dollars (nearly $10 million in today’s money) and paved the way for the development of the disposable diaper as we know it today. Donovan would go on to become one of the most prolific female inventors of her time.

She received 20 patents in total for her inventions and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.

Marion Donovan: Early Life

Marion O’Brien Donovan was born on October 15, 1917 in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

She grew up surrounded by machinery and invention.

As students at Purdue, her Irish-born father, Miles O'Brien, and his identical twin brother, Richard, invented an industrial lathe—the "South Bend lathe”—that was used to create automobile gears. The lathe was so popular that the brothers’ factory manufactured nothing else, and they did very well, making a fortune turning them out in their South Bend factory.

After her mother passed away in 1925, when she was seven, she was raised by her father.

Donovan also benefited directly from her father's ingenuity. Because she was no longer able to spend time at home, he offhandedly invented the take your-daughter-to-work movement.

Marion spent most of her free time in his factory after school and she grew up absorbed by complicated machinery. Her father, as an engineer and innovator himself, encouraged her to be innovative from a young age.

When she was in elementary school, she created a new kind of tooth cleaning powder with her father's help. He showed her what she needed to do to come up with her product. In the process he taught her a can-do spirit of problem solving.

After graduating from high school, she moved East to attend Rosemont College in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where she majored in English Literature—a parallel interest that had no doubt been sharpened when her father and uncle produced a little book, ''How to Operate a Lathe,'' in 1930 that sold 1.5 million copies in 78 countries.

After graduating in 1939 with a BA in English Literature, Marion worked for several years as an Assistant Beauty Editor at Vogue magazine in New York.

There, she met a leather importer named James Donovan. She resigned from Vogue, and in 1942 the couple married and moved to Westport, Connecticut to start a family.

Inventing an Improved Diaper

Motherhood gave Marion Donovan good reason to revive the innovative instincts of her own childhood.

By 1946, she was on her second baby, and like all mothers, struggled with her babies' exasperating habit of nearly instantaneously wetting her diapers as soon as they were changed – which, at that time, meant soiled sheets as well.

It was a problem that she believed many mothers shared.

She later 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?"

That served as Marion’s lightning bolt moment. In her opinion cloth diapers “served more as a wick than a sponge,” while rubber pants caused painful diaper rashes. So she decided to tackle the problem herself, and make something better: a waterproof diaper that mothers could use to prevent the bedding from getting dirty.

She pulled down her shower curtain, cut it into pieces, and sewed it into a waterproof diaper cover.

Marion sat down at her sewing machine and began fashioning an improved diaper. After much experimentation—and many shower curtains later—she created a reusable, leak-proof diaper cover.

She came up with a prototype of a paper diaper and began visiting paper manufacturers.

She created prototypes using a special composition of paper that is both absorbent and able to pull moisture away from babies' skin to prevent rashes.

That led to a diaper cover made from breathable parachute cloth, which had an insert for an absorbent diaper panel. That seemed to reduce the incidence of diaper rash; the air could circulate through this lighter material so the baby’s bottom could dry off.

Donovan named it the “Boater” because it looked like a boat and helped babies "stay afloat."

Another improvement Marion made was replacing safety pins with snaps and plastic straps. When trying to put on diapers with a wriggling baby, annoying pin pokes to either mother or baby were entirely possible, and the snaps solved that problem.

Persevering...

However, once she completed her work, and to her surprise and brief dismay, she found that no one was interested. At that time, men controlled manufacturing. And to them, the problems she was fixing might as well not have existed. They all responded that the disposable diaper was “not necessary.”

Though she continued to discuss the idea, she was never able to find the right company to manufacture her idea. However, diaper manufacturers failed to pick up on any aspect of her ideas, so she decided to produce and manufacture it herself.

As Donovan would tell Barbara Walters in 1975:

“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.’ So, I went into manufacturing myself.”

In the early fifties, she received four separate patents for different aspects of this item.

In 1949 the Boater debuted at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York and became an instant success.

The diaper covers' debut came at New York's Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949, where they were, unsurprisingly, an instant success.

Adam Gimbel, president of Saks Fifth Avenue at the time, wrote to Donovan: “It is not often that a new innovation in the Infants’ Wear field goes over with the immediate success of your Boaters.”

Donovan's patent was granted in 1951.

That year, she received the four patents she had applied for on the product. Later that year she sold the rights to Keko Corporation of Kankakee, Illinois for $1 million.

"Improving Even the Simplest Things"

Marion Donovan’s philosophy –that it was always worth looking for ways to improve even the simplest things—paid off.

She used that money to fund other inventions; to include her next brainstorm, inspired by her goal to dispense with the need to do so much laundry. She knew that using a paper liner could result in a disposable diaper, which would be the ultimate improvement.

She set out to find a different type of paper that would be absorbent but also pull the moisture away from the baby’s skin to prevent diaper rash.

After much experimentation in creating disposable diapers, she toured the major U.S. paper companies, leading her to a composition of sturdy, absorbent paper that did the job well.

Surprisingly, Donovan did not have instant success with this idea either.

But, a striking woman who was forever being likened to Myrna Loy when she wasn't being likened to Rosalind Russell, Donovan had no trouble getting in to see top executives of leading paper companies.

But when they heard her idea, she was roundly laughed at for proposing such an unnecessary and impractical item.

20 Patents

Meanwhile, Donovan had returned to school.

In 1958, she received a master's degree in architecture from Yale University, where she was one of three women in her graduating class.

After her husband died, she married John F. Butler in 1981.

Her consistent goal was always to create products that made life more convenient and more organized.

Between 1951-1996, Marion received a total of twenty patents. Among them—she created the “Zippity-Do,” an elastic cord that could be temporarily attached to a zipper on the back of a dress; then the wearer could use the cord to pull up the zipper by reaching over her shoulder. She also invented a soap dish that drained into the sink, and the DentaLoop, a dental floss circle that could be used by see-sawing the loop between the teeth.

Her invention, The Big Hangup, was a hanger that could hold 30 garments neatly and store them conveniently.

Companies also hired her to consult on product development, and she used her knowledge of architecture to design her own home.

The Totally Disposable Diaper

While she was never able to find the right manufacturer for her disposable diaper, she is credited with innovations that eventually led to the creation of disposable diapers which were introduced in the U.S. by Procter and Gamble in 1961.

The company purchased the Charmin’ Paper Company in 1957, and it took nearly ten years for someone to capitalize on Marion Donovan's idea: namely, a chemical engineer and grandfather named Victor Mills, who would become known as the creator of Pampers.

Whether Mills had actually met with Marion is not recorded, but certainly by that time the idea of a paper diaper was in the air. In Europe, a disposable diaper was even on the market, so many people were thinking about the possibilities.

These early disposable diapers still required pins but the change-over to tape was to complete the simplification process that Marion Donovan began with her boater.

So, it seems clear that Marion Donovan, as the inventor of the very popular “boater,” must have somehow helped bring about this new invention in Pampers.

She eventually designed her own house in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1980, but by that time, she had invented numerous practical solutions to problems around the home. For example, she reacted to an overstuffed closet, for example, by inventing the Big Hangup, a hanger that could accommodate 30 skirts or slacks in a compact space, and she solved the affront of rancid, semi-congealed soap festering in the bottom of a soap dish by inventing a wire soap holder that attached to the overflow opening and drained directly into the basin.

When she saw her second husband, John F. Butler, flossing his teeth one day, she realized how painful and ungainly it was to wrap the ends of a length of dental floss tightly around one's index fingers to pull it taut. So she solved the problem by inventing Dentaloop, individual precut circles of two-ply dental floss that could be manipulated without cutting off circulation.

Again, she produced and marketed the product herself.

Marion worked as a consultant to manufacturers of home products, and obtained twenty different patents on various types of personal conveniences.

Donovan's daughter Christine recalls growing up in a house that doubled as an R&D lab. "Mom was always drawing or working with materials—wire or plastic or nylon or paper," she says. "She had an office above the garage, but frankly, everywhere was her drawing board. The kitchen was often where Mom was, and something was always cooking, but not food—heating irons and sealants and so on."

Christine and her brother and sister would often help their mother with her inventions. "I remember working with her on putting the snaps into the boater's nylon diaper cover," she says.

As remarkable as Donovan was, to her children a life of at-home assembly lines and solvents bubbling away on the stovetop was perfectly normal. As Christine says, "Mom was Mom, and we didn’t know anything else."

Legacy

Marion Donovan died of heart disease on November 4, 1998, four months after her second husband, at the age of 81 at Lenox Hill Hospital in the Manhattan section of New York City.

She was survived by two daughters, Christine Donovan of Manhattan and Sharon Dodd of New Orleans; a son, Dr. James F. Donovan Jr. of Oklahoma City, and three grandchildren.

Only after she died did she finally begin to receive some of the attention that she deserved.

After Donovan died, her children donated her papers to the Archives Center at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History; the acquisition was part of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation’s Modern Inventors Documentation Program. The 17 boxes of artifacts contain notes, drawings, patents, customer orders, advertisements, newspaper articles, a scrapbook, personal papers and photographs. The collection is used frequently by scholars, mainly people studying women's history or the history of technology.

Donovan was elected to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May, 2015 and has a picture on the Hall of Fame wall.

Although Marion Donovan may still not be a household name today, parents everywhere have a great deal to thank her for. To put things into better perspective, imagine the world without her original concepts--according to the EPA, each baby in the United States goes through about 8,000 of disposable diapers.