It was 1956, and Procter & Gamble scientist Victor Mills was a new grandfather.

With the girl's birth, he learned the realities of baby care, including the unpleasant task of changing and laundering diapers.

His granddaughter, just like all infants, went through her share of diapers, and Mills was getting frustrated with it. "I just thought it was a mess," he told the Cincinnati Enquirer after he retired.

The bottom line was this: Mothers in the U.S. were using cloth diapers and plastic pants on their babies. They washed the diapers or used a diaper laundry service. Disposable diapers were on the market, but mothers used them on their babies only while traveling because they didn't work particularly well. They leaked and were uncomfortable.

Mills (1896-1997) also had a professional challenge. He was director of exploratory development for Procter & Gamble, and the company had just bought a large paper mill. One of his assignments was to come up with new products to produce using the paper mill's technology.

He got to thinking and, as Procter & Gamble knew, that often helped the company's bottom line and changed the way people lived.

The way Mills figured, wouldn't it be great if one of these new products could be a disposable diaper that mothers would be willing to have their babies wear all the time?

A Long Road

By the time Mills geared his team to develop Pampers diapers, he was in the home stretch of a 35-year career at P&G, which began in 1926 when he was 30 and ended in 1961.

During that tenure, he helped develop many products that became popular around the world. Even though he left the firm half a century ago, his is the name Procter & Gamble uses when it honors its own. The Victor Mills Society was created for employees whose innovations make important contributions to the company.

Mills was born in Milford, Neb. He earned a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Washington and served in the Navy. Joining P&G, he applied his engineering know-how to products and processes that helped the company grow into the consumer products behemoth it's been for decades.

"A lot of my inventions were applying something that works one place to a different situation," he said.

Mills was involved in creating Pringles potato crisps, which came out in 1968 — after he retired — and have stayed on shelves for decades.

He also developed processes that kept oil mixed into peanut butter and that turned mixes into smooth cakes. To keep the cakes from becoming lumpy, he passed mix ingredients through large milling drums designed to polish aluminum foil. The product improved greatly. Mills' change to the Duncan Hines cake mix turned it into a top seller.

Mills' daughter, Maile Mills Cuddy, told the New York Times in his obituary that she remembered being involved in her father's inventing process. While he was working on the Duncan Hines cake mix, he would bring cakes home. "We would taste cakes until they came out our ears," she said.

One of his earliest contributions to P&G was a big change in the way the company produced Ivory soap. The floating soap was popular, but the way it was produced took too much time. Workers cooked it in kettles, and a batch took days to make.

Mills changed the process so the soap was made in large vats and mixed by machine — in two hours. The process he developed superheated the liquid soap and sprayed a concentrated form through a machine that created a long line of soap that could be cut into bars.

This course revolutionized the soap-production operation at Procter & Gamble and led to one of Mills' 25 patents.

Mills initially worried that the new soap melted away too quickly. Then again, that was a plus to the P&G people adding up sales figures. They realized they would be selling loads of more-soluble soap.

When it came to the disposable diaper, Mills and his team faced a different kind of challenge.

Since disposal diapers on the market had problems, Procter & Gamble bought a patent for a disposable diaper from another inventor, Marion Donovan, which made her a wealthy woman. But her product — as with all the other disposable diapers on the market — couldn't be used every day.

Ed Harness, CEO at P&G in the 1970s, said in a company historical report: "Existing products were not good. Their prices were too high, and retail distribution was minuscule. Despite these negatives, company people had imagination and foresight enough to recognize that a really good disposable diaper at a reasonable price, backed with marketing know-how, could bring about an enormous change in one of motherhood's oldest chores."

To create that really good disposable, Mills and his team put paper between an outer plastic layer and an inner rayon layer. They tested the diaper on dolls as well as Mills' granddaughter, says Ed Rider, Procter & Gamble's corporate archivist.

In 1961, when the first version of Pampers was ready to hit the public, Mills ended his career at Procter & Gamble.

Over the next decades, the product took on new looks and feels. Adhesive tabs came onboard. The shape and content of the absorbent core changed. Now, instead of a paper core, disposable diapers contain superabsorbent polymers.

Which leads to this: Diapers have come under attack from the environmental lobby because of the space they take up in landfills, a challenge that Victor Mills did not anticipate when he was developing the product. Then again, some studies show that diaper laundering, which uses hot water and electricity, isn't any better environmentally.

Keep Trying

Mills often talked about how a lot of his success came from experimenting, from trying existing technology on new products.

"You see I was obsessed with continuous processing," he said in records from the P&G corporate archives. "When it came to cake mixes, I started thinking, 'What would it do if you put it through a soap mill?' So that's what I call a transfer of technology."

Transfer of technology included what he did to clean up Ivory soap and other products. He created assembly-line speed for products that were previously made in small batches, says Bruce Finlayson, an emeritus professor and former chairman of the University of Washington's chemical engineering department.

"The essence of engineering is to make a product people want for a price they can afford to pay," Finlayson said on Mills' 100th birthday. "Victor Mills is the quintessential engineer."


BY KATHLEEN McKERNAN