Smaller

The disposable diaper and the meaning of progress.

The best way to explore the mystery of the Huggies Ultratrim disposable diaper is to unfold it and then cut it in half, widthwise, across what is known as the diaper's chassis. At Kimberly-Clark's Lakeview plant, in Neenah, Wisconsin, where virtually all the Huggies in the Midwest are made, there is a quality-control specialist who does this all day long, culling diapers from the production line, pinning them up against a lightboard, and carefully dismembering them with a pair of scissors. There is someone else who does a "visual cull," randomly picking out Huggies and turning them over to check for flaws. But a surface examination tells you little. A diaper is not like a computer that makes satisfying burbling noises from time to time, hinting at great inner complexity. It feels like papery underwear wrapped around a thin roll of Cottonelle. But peel away the soft fabric on the top side of the diaper, the liner, which receives what those in the trade delicately refer to as the "insult." You'll find a layer of what's called polyfilm, which is thinner than a strip of Scotch tape. This layer is one of the reasons the garment stays dry: it has pores that are large enough to let air flow in, so the diaper can breathe, but small enough to keep water from flowing out, so the diaper doesn't leak.

Or run your hands along that liner. It feels like cloth. In fact, the people at Kimberly-Clark make the liner out of a special form of plastic, a polyresin. But they don't melt the plastic into a sheet, as one would for a plastic bag. They spin the resin into individual fibres, and then use the fibres to create a kind of microscopic funnel, channelling the insult toward the long, thick rectangular pad that runs down the center of the chassis, known as the absorbent core. A typical insult arrives at a rate of seven millilitres a second, and might total seventy millilitres of fluid. The liner can clear that insult in less than twenty seconds. The core can hold three or more of those insults, with a chance of leakage in the single digits. The baby's skin will remain almost perfectly dry, and that is critical, because prolonged contact between the baby and the insult (in particular, ammonium hydroxide, a breakdown product of urine) is what causes diaper rash. And all this will be accomplished by a throwaway garment measuring, in the newborn size, just seven by thirteen inches. This is the mystery of the modern disposable diaper: how does something so small do so much?

Thirty-seven years ago, the Silicon Valley pioneer Gordon Moore made a famous prediction. The number of transistors that engineers could fit onto a microchip, he said, would double every two years. It seemed like a foolhardy claim: it was not clear that you could keep making transistors smaller and smaller indefinitely. It also wasn't clear that it would make sense to do so. Most of the time when we make things smaller, after all, we pay a price. A smaller car is cheaper and more fuel-efficient, and easier to park and maneuver, but it will never be as safe as a larger car. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the transistor radio was all the rage; it could fit inside your pocket and run on a handful of batteries. But, because it was so small, the sound was terrible, and virtually all the other mini-electronics turn out to be similarly imperfect. Tiny cell phones are hard to dial. Tiny televisions are hard to watch. In making an object smaller, we typically compromise its performance. The remarkable thing about chips, though, was that there was no drawback: if you could fit more and more transistors onto a microchip, then instead of using ten or twenty or a hundred microchips for a task you could use just one. This meant, in turn, that you could fit microchips in all kinds of places (such as cellular phones and laptops) that you couldn't before, and, because you were using one chip and not a hundred, computer power could be had at a fraction of the price, and because chips were now everywhere and in such demand they became even cheaper to make--and so on and so on. Moore's Law, as it came to be called, describes that rare case in which there is no trade-off between size and performance. Microchips are what might be termed a perfect innovation.

In the past twenty years, diapers have got smaller and smaller, too. In the early eighties, they were three times bulkier than they are now, thicker and substantially wider in the crotch. But in the mid-eighties Huggies and Procter & Gamble's Pampers were reduced in bulk by fifty per cent; in the mid-nineties they shrank by a third or so; and in the next few years they may shrink still more. It seems reasonable that there should have been a downside to this, just as there was to the shrinking of cars and radios: how could you reduce the amount of padding in a diaper and not, in some way, compromise its ability to handle an insult? Yet, as diapers got smaller, they got better, and that fact elevates the diaper above nearly all the thousands of other products on the supermarket shelf.

by Malcom Gladwell (2001), Gladwell.com |  Read more:

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