The history of gloves stretches back centuries. However, disposable gloves for hygiene and sterility purposes have a much more recent background.

When were gloves invented as we know them today? The first rubber gloves were created by William Stewart Halsted, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Unfortunately, cleaning these gloves was a cumbersome process, which led to other companies later inventing a fully disposable, single-use latex glove that quickly gained popularity across a number of healthcare settings.

Over time, the use of disposable gloves spread to other industries, including food service, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing.

But the evolution of disposable gloves wasn’t over yet. As latex gloves became more widespread, latex allergies among its users became an issue. This eventually led to the production of nitrile gloves in the 1990s, and the rise in popularity of nitrile gloves to become the most widespread version to be sold worldwide. Read more >