Baby Gates Formerly Known as Nursery Gates

Today I had my curiosity hat on and I was wondering what sort of history was involved with baby gates. I began my search on Google looking for any scholarly documents that might have been written … none to be found.

I then branched out to Wikipedia to see what they had in their online dictionary … nothing found. Okay, now I was really curious, so I started looking up U.S. patents on baby gates …. none found.

Wow, how could this be? Well, by accident I stumbled onto why I wasn’t finding anything under baby gates. When the first patent (that I could find) was registered (1871), it was registered as a nursery gate. All patents since then where “improvements to the nursery gate”.

I was quite surprised to see that there have been literally hundreds of patents filed for various enhancements to these gates, for gate locking improvements, for better gate sliders, and so on.

It was also quite surprising that the original patent in 1871 looks very similar to today’s standard baby gates. Although there have been hundreds of improvements, the basic concept still remains the same.

The well known accordion style of gate appeared first in 1948. This format of gate still exists today, but has been altered for safety reasons. These gates now have a solid top bar. This bar was added to overcome the outcry that occurred in the 1960′s when a child hung himself in the V shaped crosses at the top of the original gate.

With today’s level of product scrutiny, all baby gates must now pass a safety standard implemented by the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association (JPMA) and those of the Consumer Products Safety Commission.

I was unable to trace down the first publicly marketed baby gate. If anyone is aware of this history, I would love to know more about it.