Florence Zacks Melton died last month at age 95. She held the patent for foam slippers, as well as 18 other patents for products like shoulder pads and cushioning devices for exercise and physical therapy machines.
Early in the postwar days, fashion still had a military look: women wore double-breasted suits with padded shoulders. To clean the garment, the shoulder pads had to be removed, then sewn back in place. In 1947, Mrs. Melton patented a cotton-batting shoulder pad with an elastic tab that could be snapped to a bra strap, eliminating the need to sew it into a garment. The product, Shoulda-Shams, sold well.
..."She thought: Wouldn't it be great to mold foam rubber into the shape of a shoulder pad, eliminate the cotton batting and have a machine-washable product." They went to the Firestone headquarters in Akron and signed a contract to use foam rubber for their shoulder pads.
"On the drive back to Columbus," Gordon Zacks said, "my mother said: 'Aaron, you know what we ought to do with foam rubber? We ought to walk on it.'" She patented the idea in 1948. Since then, the company has sold more than a billion pairs of slippers....Mrs. Melton's company remains competitive: last year it sold more than 25 million pairs.
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