I have a child and a toddler. I can't go anywhere without diapers. They are in my laptop bag and my husband's briefcase, in my mountaineering backpack, hidden in all the suitcases, hidden in the gloves of every car I borrowed. They are the common characteristics of my parents, and I hardly thought about what life would be like without them. But until the middle of the 20th century, changing a baby's diaper meant folding and nailing a towel, and then putting on a pair of rubber pants.

In the late 1940s, a woman named Marion Donovan changed all this. She invented a new diaper, a plastic cover like an envelope with an absorbable liner on it. Her invention was patented at 195 1, with a net profit of 1 million dollars (nearly 1 million dollars today), paving the way for the development of diapers as we know them today. Donovan will continue to be one of the most prolific female inventors of her time. Her mother died when she was a child, and her father, an engineer and inventor, encouraged her to innovate. She invented a new type of toothpaste in primary school. After graduating from college, she worked as an editor in a women's magazine in new york, and then got married and settled in Connecticut.

There, as a young mother tired of changing wet sheets, Donovan had her lightning moment. In her view, cloth diapers "can play a greater wick role than sponges", while rubber pants can cause diaper rash. So she decided to do something better. She pulled down the shower curtain, cut it into pieces and sewed it on the waterproof diaper cover with a snap instead of a safety pin. This creates a diaper cover made of breathable parachute cloth, which has an insert that can absorb the diaper panel. Donovan named it "boatman".

Marion Donovan's "diaper packaging", 195 16 12, was patented (US patent 2556800), and the manufacturer was not interested in it. As Donovan told Barbara walters in 1975:

"I went to all the big names you can think of and they said,' We don't want them. No woman asked us to do this. They are very happy. They bought all our baby pants. "So, I did it myself."

1949, she started selling this wild boar on Saks Fifth Avenue, where it immediately became popular. Two years later, she sold her company and patent right to Keke Company for $6,543,800+. Donovan once considered developing a kind of absorbent paper diaper, but it was said that the executives at that time were not interested in it. Pampers, the first disposable diaper in mass production, was not put on the market until 196 1.

This ship is not the end of Donovan's invention. She also obtained a total of 20 patents, from zipper drawstring to skirt with back zipper, to boxed checks and record books, to a new flossing device.

Boating advertisement (thesis by Marion O 'Brien Donovan, Archives Center, National Museum of American History)? After Donovan of the Smithsonian Institution died on 1998, her children donated her papers to the archive center of the Smithsonian National History Museum. The acquisition is part of the Modern Inventor Documentation Project of Mei Sen Research Center for Invention and Innovation. 17 boxes of cultural relics include notes, drawings, patents, customer orders, advertisements, newspaper articles, scrapbooks, personal documents and photos. Alison Oswald, an archivist at the lemerre Sen Center, said that these collections are often used by scholars, mainly those who study women or the history of science and technology. Oswald said:

"For the female inventors of this period, her collection is quite comprehensive." We are really lucky. Her family saved as much money as they did, because the records of inventions may be fragmentary.

Donovan's daughter Christie