After ten years of experimentation, the nonwovens department and its Masslinn fabrics became a division of the Chicopee Manufacturing Corporation. Rayon replaced cotton in most commercial products, and the fabrics were put to use in bed pads, dental napkins, surgical towels, disposable diapers, sanitary napkins, hand towels, casket linings, pattern markers, ribbons, and wiping cloths. Nearly forty years later, production facilities using jets of water to bond fibres together to produce nonwoven surgical gauze were completed. Today, many woven gauze applications have been replaced by nonwoven fabrics.
Freudenberg of Germany also entered the nonwovens area in the 1930s. Freudenberg‘s quest was to find a substitute for leather. Today this firm is a major worldwide producer of nonwoven interlinings a( woven fabric replacement). Other industrial pioneers involved in developing nonwovens as textile replacements include Avondale, Kimberly-Clark, Kendall, and West Point.

The concept of producing special papers from long fibres by a single continuous process has been attributed to Fay H. Osborne. Osborne's analysis of the properties of soft, strong, flexible cigar tissue wrap and durable stencil paper "hand made" in Japan initiated an eight-year study focused on locating appropriate sources of fibre and developing a method to modify the modern papermaking process to accommodate these fibres. Osborne observed that the cylindrical, rigid fibres in the Japanese hand papers were sixty times longer, four times thinner, and extensively more uniform than fibres used in normal paper. After evaluating scores of natural fibres and many of the new man-made fibres, he determined that musa textilis, or manila hemp, grown in the Philippines and used for making rope, would meet his technical requirements.

Processing these long fibres at normal water-fibre dilution ratios on conventional papermaking machinery, however, would not work. Osborne's solution to the problem was to change slurry consistency from 0.25 to 0.0025 percent fibre, and to incline the forming wire to an angle of about 20 percent. The first commercial long-fibre paper was produced at Dexter in 1934; six years later, product diversity included specialty papers for electrolytic condensers, vacuum bags, stencils, meat casings, tea bags, and diapers. Later developments include wet -laid nonwovens made from various synthetic, glass, and natural fibre furnishes.

Considering the success demonstrated by textile and paper producers in making fabrics directly from fibres, it would appear that a logical next step would be to make fabrics directly from the materials used to make the fibres themselves — cutting out altogether the fibre production step. It is not surprising, therefore, that following the successful introduction of synthetic fibres into traditional woven and knitted fabrics, fibre producers devoted some focus on nonwovens. The quest by synthetic fibre producers for new applications and markets resulted in the introduction of synthetic staple into nonwoven products in the mid-1950s.

The knowledge gained in adapting these new fibres to the various commercial nonwoven processes available at the time resulted in an increased understanding of how these processes really work. These discoveries, in turn, brought about improvements to those processes and expanded into the development of new technologies for making fabrics directly from fibres, and expanded them further into the development of methods for making fabric directly from the fibre-forming polymer itself. Two closely related technologies are illustrative of methods for making fabric directly from the fibre-forming polymers, namely, spunbonding and meltblowing.

The spunbond process transforms polymer directly to fabric by extruding filaments, orienting them as bundles or groupings, layering them on a conveying screen in a patterned array, and interlocking them by thermal fusion, mechanical entanglement, chemical adhesives, or combinations of the above. The first three operations are elements of synthetic fibre extrusion, also known as spinning, and constitute the spun or web formation phase of the process, while the last operation is the web-consolidation or bonding phase — hence the generic term spun-bond. Several methods of achieving the spunbond process have been developed as commercial operations, and each produces fabric with a high ratio of strength per unit weight. Technology for commercially producing spunbonds was developed over forty years ago in Germany by Freudenberg and in the United States by DuPont. These early systems, as well as others developed later in the Netherlands, England, and France were guarded proprietary processes. A spunbond technology system developed by Lurgi in Germany was sold on a licensing basis during the early 1970s. The various technologies differ in the methods of passing the polymer through the spinneret, separating the filaments at the extruder head, orienting the filaments, collecting the filaments on the conveyor screen, and/or bonding the filaments together.

Meltblown fabrics, like most spunbonds, are manufactured directly from thermoplastic resins. The resin in chip form is heated, hence the term melt, to the liquid state and, as it passes through an extrusion orifice, is injected (blown) with sonic-velocity air at about 250-500° C. The fast-moving air streams effectively shatter, stretch, and solidify the molten polymer into an attenuated, very fine-diameter fibrous array. The array is then separated from the air stream as a randomly entangled web and compressed between heated rolls. The combination of fine-diameters, random entanglement, and close packing brings about a fabric structure with a high surface area and a large number of pores per unit weight. Meltblown technology was developed at the US Naval Research Laboratories. A description of the original work in this field was published by Wente in 1956. Researchers at Esso and others independently at 3M improved the process during the mid-1960s and commercialized products in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, Exxon began a worldwide licensing program, which attracted firms such as Kimberly-Clark, Riegel Paper, Pall, and Electrolux. Over the past two decades, developments in melt-blown technology have focused on improvements in die design, web handling, resin requirements, energy utilization, and other means to enhance productivity and fabric strength.

Nonwoven fabric development during the 1980s and into the new millennium expanded on the general theme of finding a way to make better fabric materials more efficiently through the process of technology hybridization. Nonwoven hybrid technologies include
(1) methods to combine two or more nonwoven fabrics made by any of the primary nonwoven manufacturing systems,
(2) methods to provide a combination of fabric properties, and
(3) methods to produce true composite nonwoven structures. Combining systems employ lamination technology, or at least one basic nonwoven web formation or consolidation method, to join two or more fabric layers. Combination systems utilize at least one basic nonwoven web formation, bonding, or finishing element to enhance the properties of one or more fabric substrates. Composite systems integrate two or more nonwoven web formation technologies to produce nonwoven structures.