Poop on Deck: The History of the Disposable Diaper

Few things on this earth are more vile than a topped-off pair of Pampers with the space-age plastic ass all pooched out from an unfortunate run-in with some cruel infant's monstrous movement. Of the things that are more vile, a packed diaper exploding on a porch in the hot Texas sun and mayonnaise sandwich day at the old folks' home are the only two I'm permitted by law to mention here. But there is one creaky sunken battleship from the annals of viledom that I can resurrect here, just to see retired parents get that far-away look in their eye and that fire-away feeling in their queasy gut. An invention that will live in household infamy for all time:

The cloth diaper.

What few remember, and even fewer believe, is that before the disposable diaper came along, babies, the elderly and the fabulously lazy shat their days away in low-tech cloth diapers, not much different from the shammy you use to dry your car today. Actually, smell that shammy before you use it again, just a tip. But the kicker, the part that will really roast your oats is this: because of shortages caused by over-harvesting in the shammy forests of South America (as documented in Dr. Seuss's whistle-blowing novel, The Lorax), you couldn't just use the things and then throw them away. You actually had to find some way to wrap your mind around washing these horribly soiled crimes against nature, and then press them into service once again. I know, I know, and let me be the first to say it: history is gross.

The man who liberated us all from this ammonia-scented hell was an unassuming young fuddydud named Arthur Ringbaum. Ringbaum was a fast-rising idea man in the Proctor & Gamble Company, and at the crisp young age of 32 had already enjoyed numerous well-advertised successes. He had invented the three-dollar enema, and it was his idea to shoot rabbits out of a cannon to make sure makeup was safe. Ringbaum would have been known as the MacGuyver of product design, excepting for the fact that the show didn't exist in that day, and its star, Richard Dean Anderson, was but a quizzical swelling in his father's Sunday school trousers at that point.

But it would have been an apt comparison nonetheless, as Ringbaum was famous within the company for turning executive incompetence and planning blunders into hot, in-demand products. Legend had it that when presented with hundreds of decapitated horses' heads from a recent train accident, Ringbaum created the hobbyhorse, which became a huge success after the dead horses' heads were replaced with stuffed-felt facsimiles.

None of his past successes would prepare Ringbaum for the fame and adulation that the invention of the disposable diaper would bring him in the early 1960's. He became a worldwide celebrity who was loved universally, except for the people who mailed him soiled cloth diapers pinned to harsh notes questioning why he didn't think of it sooner, dammit.

In early April of 1960, Proctor and Gamble executives were faced with a dilemma. They had a huge amount of plastic left over from the poofy plastic chef's hat craze that had failed to take off as expected the year before. Fearful that they might have to resort to feeding their families big bowls of shredded plastic, the executives turned again to Ringbaum, who was still riding high on the success of his "meat thermometer," a regular thermometer made more profitable by the addition of the popular word "meat" to the packaging. Ringbaum took one look at the thousands of surplus plastic hats and he knew it. They were screwed.

But while having his ass kissed in London later that week, Ringbaum stumbled across an idea that was just crazy enough to work poorly. He rushed back to Proctor & Gamble headquarters and ordered to have all of the plastic hats filled with confetti left over from the planned parade to celebrate the success of the chef's hat division, which, for obvious reasons, never took place. After punching a few thousand leg holes and debating for months over the product name ("Snugglers," "Growlers," and "Ass Wraps" were all considered, but ultimately rejected), Pampers were released to the general public. They were an instant hit, and after print ads clarified that they were for use on babies, sales really took off.

The original Pampers had to be duct taped onto the baby's skin and only did their job for about forty seconds, but the prospect of never having to wash a nasty diaper again, not to mention the convenience being able to fling a bag of putrid scat onto your hated neighbor's roof on a moment's whim in the middle of the night, won over consumers regardless. Over the years the diaper has been improved in countless ways, with its absorbent core gradually refined to contain tissue, cardboard, pulp, liver & onions, and ultimately a super-absorbent chemical gel that will one day destroy us all.

What was a happy story for parents the world over turned out to be a sad one for Arthur Ringbaum himself. He never again reached the dizzying highs of his success with the disposable diaper, and his subsequent inventions such as the Vacuum Corral, the Coin-Eating Pope and the Couch Potato met with limited public interest. In 1988 he was shot dead outside his Maryland home by a West Virgina woman who had just the week before found out about disposable diapers. Sadly, he never lived to be old enough to enjoy the ultimate fruits of his labor, if it's not too disconcerting to refer to adult diapers as fruits. The New Jersey Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste currently has plans in the works to open a new landfill in his honor.

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