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Inventor of the waterproof diaper cover
On the record
Marion O'Brien was born in Fort Wayne on October 15, 1917, and grew up around the manufacturing plant run by her father and uncle. In 1946, frustrated with cloth diapers, she sewed a waterproof cover from a shower curtain and then from parachute cloth, fastening it with snaps instead of safety pins. Marketed as the "Boater," it went on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949; when her patent was granted in 1951 she sold it, with her company, to the Keko Corporation for one million dollars. She then designed a fully disposable paper diaper, which manufacturers turned down; Pampers reached the market a decade later, in 1961. She held twenty patents in all, among them the DentaLoop dental-floss holder. She died on November 4, 1998, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.
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- § 06 — people of the record · famous-people supplement
Sources: Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation; National Inventors Hall of Fame.