History
The practical history
2 min read
1896 – now
Running underneath all of it is a plainer story: what people actually used. For most of history the answer was cloth, washed and reused, and the historical record is thin precisely because the subject was unmentionable.
| Year | What changed |
|---|---|
| 1896 | Johnson & Johnson market Lister's Towels, a disposable pad. It fails commercially — the product was acceptable, the act of buying it was not. |
| First World War | Nurses at the front discover that cellucotton, a wood-pulp bandage material, absorbs far better than cloth, and use it for themselves. |
| 1920–21 | Kimberly-Clark turn surplus war bandage material into Kotex. Sources differ on whether the product appeared in 1920 or 1921; the advertising campaign that made it succeed ran from 1921. |
| 1926 | Kotex is placed on counters with a payment box so a woman need not ask a clerk for it — among the first self-service items in American retail. The innovation being sold was avoiding speech. |
| 1931–36 | Earle Haas patents an applicator tampon; sources give the filing as 1931 and the grant as 1933. Sold as Tampax from 1936 after Gertrude Tendrich bought the patent. |
| 1937 | Leona Chalmers patents a rubber menstrual cup. It takes roughly seventy years to find a market. |
| 1970s | Adhesive pads replace belts. |
| 1980 | Toxic shock syndrome linked to high-absorbency tampons; the Rely brand is withdrawn. Absorbency labelling is standardised afterwards. |
| 2000s– | Cups, discs and period underwear reach wide use — and the assumption that a "product change" equals a fixed volume, which underpinned decades of blood-loss estimation, stops holding. |
Dates from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and the New York Academy of Medicine historical collections; where sources conflict, both are given rather than one chosen. The 1980 toxic shock entry is flagged for verification below.
Two things are worth noticing in that table. Almost every advance was driven by absorbency technology developed for something else — usually war. And the marketing innovations were consistently about concealment: how to buy it without speaking, how to wear it without anyone knowing. The taboo shaped the products as much as the physiology did.