History of the Home Pregnancy Test - the Atlantic
While women no longer needed a frog or a rabbit, though, they still needed a doctor. The test also frequently turned up false positives, as hCG could easily be confused for other similar hormones. A more accurate test wouldn’t arrive until 1972, when Judith Vaitukaitis and Glenn Braunstein, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, identified an immunoassay that could successfully measure levels of hCG, rather than simply detecting its presence. Recognizing the potential of their discovery, the two attempted to patent it on behalf of NIH—but were shot down by the institute’s lawyers, who argued that because the project had been funded with public dollars, nobody should receive any royalties for the resulting product. Instead, the knowledge went immediately into the public domain, until pharmaceutical companies recognized the same potential that Vaitukaitis and Braunstein had seen.
…“The pregnancy test has a very different significance to different people,” Marcel Wanders, a product designer for a 1990 version of Organon’s test, told The New York Times in 2012. “You can’t put too much meaning into it.”
He was referring to the challenge of choosing the graphic that would appear on the test to signify a pregnancy. In the years before today’s blue lines, The Times reported, a positive result came in the form of a baby’s smiling face, a swollen belly, even a single wiggling sperm—cutesy, cheery images announcing news that, for many women, is neither cheery nor cute.