Thomas Blanket, however, did not invent the blanket. He simply designed a prolific kind of weave and popularized a name for it. Types of products like blankets have existed for millenia. The earliest record of blankets comes from the Atharvaveda, the fourth book of the Hindu Vedas. This text, likely written around 1000 BCE, uses the word “kambala” as a generic term for shawls and blankets. Later, the 7th-century Chinese traveler Xuanzang would use the term in his journal to describe a fabric made from goat or sheep hair. The Sanskrit meaning of the term is “a woolen blanket.” Even in Europe, it is thought that the Vikings were snuggling up in blankets on the journey over to pillage the British Isles more than 300 years before Thomas Blanket got his name. Cultures all across the globe, even in tropical climates, have used blankets to help themselves sleep all throughout history.
It might be an unsatisfying answer to the question, but like many cornerstone inventions of the modern world, the blanket has no single inventor. Instead, the concept has floated around between cultures, iterating on itself for hundreds of years until it became what we now call a blanket. But as old and universal as the blanket is, there have been times and places where blankets were considered a luxury.
Up until advancements in textile manufacturing in the late Middle Ages in Europe, if a peasant wanted a blanket, they’d have to make it by hand. And when most of your day is spent trying not to die from starvation, plague, or an invading army, there’s just not a lot of time or energy left to sit down and stitch a blanket. There wasn’t usually a village blanket-weaver, and if there was, the vast majority of the peasantry wouldn’t even have the money necessary to buy one of them. The time and resource investment into coziness just wasn’t worth it at the time for most people.
Between then and now, the process by which blankets are made became streamlined and industrialized. Mass textile manufacturing made blankets more widely available. But the cost of the raw materials necessary in the production of blankets was still expensive. Industrialized agricultural practices, chief amongst them the use of pesticides, significantly lowered the cost of cotton starting around the 1930s. Soon, these practices would become standard for all crops. The further invention of synthetic fabrics like polyester made the process of textile manufacturing even more cost effective. Soon, blankets were all over, not just in bedrooms, but all over the home, and were even reimagined into clothing, like the Snuggie.
