Marion Donovan
Marion Donovan ( * 1917 in Fort Wayne, Indiana as Marion O'Brien; † 4 November 1998) was an American architect and inventor of the disposable diaper.
She was born 1917 in Fort Wayne, Indiana as Marion O'Brien. Her mother died when she was seven years old and she grew up in a man's world, marked by her father, the transmission for the auto industry in his own workshop and produced numerous inventions -actuated.
She graduated in English literature in 1939 from near Philadelphia at Rosemont College and worked in New York for the fashion magazine Vogue. After her marriage to businessman James Donovan, she moved to Westport, Connecticut and became a housewife and mother.
In 1946, she came by their children to the idea of having to do something about the ever- full and leaking diapers and remembered their roots as the inventor 's daughter to revolutionize the work of women with winding. She was sewing on her sewing machine first diaper pants from different shower curtains that have been worn over the cloth diaper. Unlike rubber pants, diaper pants than it already was at that time, the babies were given no more diaper rash. They called these chaps Boaters because they held the babies "stay afloat ", " water ". The final version of the Boater originated from parachute nylon and also had safety pins instead of push buttons made of plastic and metal.
The Boater it sold for the first time in 1949 in New York and was sold like hot cakes in the mothers. In 1951, she received the patent for the Boater and worked on the disposable diaper out of paper. It was not easy to find a paper that was fast enough to absorb liquid to keep moisture away from baby's skin and thereby prevent diaper rash.
Donovan offered its invention at several paper mills in the U.S. and was always just smiled. Ten years later, Victor Mills ( Chemical Engineering at the industry giant Procter & Gamble) has earned the invention of Pampers a fortune.
Marion Donovan joined the meantime from the study of architecture at Yale University in 1980 and had her own design house in Greenwich, Connecticut build. She had over a dozen patents, most inventions were household utensils.