Marion Donovan cut up her shower curtain in 1946 because her baby kept soaking through everything. The only waterproof option then was rubber pants, which gave babies rashes and pinched their legs. She sat at her sewing machine and made a cover out of vinyl instead, then improved it with surplus parachute cloth so the skin could breathe. She replaced the safety pins with snaps. She called it the Boater, because it kept a baby afloat. Then she took it to every large manufacturer in the country. Her own account of what they said, in a television interview years later, was that they did not need it, because no woman had ever asked them for such a thing and mothers were perfectly happy buying the rubber pants. So she manufactured it herself. It went on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1949 and sold immediately, passing a million and a quarter by 1950. She patented it in 1951 and sold the company for a million dollars, roughly nine million in today's money. Her next idea was a fully disposable diaper made of absorbent paper. The paper companies laughed and called it unnecessary and impractical. Pampers arrived a decade later, and roughly 95 percent of American babies now wear one. She went back to school after that. She had always wanted to be an architect, and she took a degree at Yale in 1958, one of three women in her class. She designed her own house at 63. Twenty patents over her life. All of it started with a shower curtain and a sewing machine. invent.org/inductees/marion-…