What do you do when your employer, a big consumer goods company, has just acquired several paper mills and now has more paper than it knows what to do with? Well, obviously, you dream up a new and revolutionary product that just so happens to use huge quantities of paper.
For Victor Mills, head of the exploratory products division of Procter & Gamble, the brainwave came courtesy of his family. Mills had just become a grandfather, and was painfully reminded of just how much he detested washing nappies. The idea was born: what if you could create a nappy consisting mostly of shredded absorbent paper which could simply be thrown away after use?
Many hours of experimenting with different types of paper and nappy designs, all with the help of a trusted ‘team’ of Betsy Wetsy toys (a brand of ‘realistic’ urinating doll popular in the 1950s) followed. Further product testing followed on a family holiday, where Mills took his by now three grandchildren on many long drives. The nappies proved to be a full success, now all they needed was a name: Tads? Solos? How about Larks? None seemed right. Eventually, P&G settled on Pampers. And the world’s best-known disposable nappy was born.
Despite questions of the sustainability of the throw-away nappy, the reality is that some 90% of babies in the industrial world wear them. Globally, the market is worth some US$29b/y. Of course today the paper filling of the early nappies has long since been replaced by superabsorbers, making the nappies much thinner while increasingly leak-proof.
And Victor Mills, rather than sinking into the obscurity afforded to most chemical engineers, remains one of P&G’s best-remembered innovators. To this date, the company runs the ‘Victor Mills Society’, an elite club reserved for its most accomplished scientists and innovators.
Full article published in: tce 839, May 2011