Who Invented the Sleeping Bag? From Inuit Fur Bags to Modern Wool

Who invented the sleeping bag? No single person did. Arctic peoples were sleeping in fur sacks thousands of years before anyone filed a patent, and the first bag sold by the tens of thousands was a Welsh wool blanket with a pillow sewn in. What follows is the actual history of the sleeping bag, from Inuit caribou skins to the nylon mummy, and what the oldest designs understood about moisture that the newest ones forgot.

The short answer

If you need one name for a quiz, it is Pryce Pryce-Jones of Newtown, Wales, whose Euklisia Rug of 1876 is usually credited as the first mass-produced sleeping bag. If you want the honest answer, the sleeping bag was invented several times over: by Inuit and other Arctic peoples who sewed fur into sacks, by 19th-century polar and alpine expeditions who copied them in reindeer skin and wool, and by 20th-century manufacturers who swapped in down, zippers and finally nylon and polyester.

The materials changed almost completely. The problem did not. A sleeping bag has to hold a pocket of still air around a body that gives off heat and roughly half a litre of water vapour every night. Every design in this history is an answer to that pair of demands, and the interesting part is which ones answered both.

Before the bag: shelter and bedding were one system

For most of human history nobody carried a sleeping bag because nobody needed a separate one. A robe was clothing by day and a blanket by night. Shelter did the rest: a brush wickiup in the desert Southwest, a skin lodge on the plains, a snow house in the Arctic. The bedding was hides, woven blankets, grass, boughs. The photographs below are from Edward S. Curtis’s early-20th-century survey of Native American life, and they show the two halves of that system: a thatched shelter, and a single heavy robe worn as a coat while gathering the night’s firewood.

The Inuit sleeping bag: fur, turned inward

The first true sleeping sacks come from the Arctic, where a robe alone is not enough. Inuit and Yupik peoples of Greenland, Canada and Alaska sewed caribou (reindeer) skins into bags with the fur facing inward, sometimes with a second skin fur-out, and sometimes with a sealskin outer to shed spray on a sledge or a boat. Caribou hair is hollow, which traps air along the length of each fibre; the hide itself blocks wind; and the whole thing could be turned inside out in the morning so frost from breath and sweat could be beaten off before it melted back in.

That last detail matters. Fur and skin are not waterproof from the inside. They accept the body’s vapour, hold it as frost near the outer surface, and give it up when shaken or aired. The bag stays usable for weeks because moisture has a way out. When 19th-century explorers borrowed the design, this was the part they got right by accident and the part 20th-century designers lost on purpose.

When were sleeping bags invented? The explorers’ bags of the 1800s

Europeans started carrying purpose-made sleeping sacks in the 19th century, and they carried exactly what the Arctic had shown them. Fridtjof Nansen’s 1888 crossing of the Greenland ice cap used reindeer-skin bags, including a three-man bag so the party could share warmth. Robert Falcon Scott’s and Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions two decades later still used reindeer fur, fur-in for warmth or fur-out for a drier bag. Their diaries record the downside: on long journeys in extreme cold the bags iced up from the inside, gaining pounds of frozen breath that no amount of morning beating could remove.

Alongside the fur bags ran a cheaper tradition: the blanket bag. Soldiers, shepherds and walkers folded a wool blanket in half, pinned or stitched the foot and side, and slept in the resulting envelope, often with a waxed or rubberised groundsheet underneath. It weighed a few pounds, dried by the fire, and could be resewn with a needle and thread. It is the direct ancestor of everything Lucky Sheep makes.

The Euklisia Rug (1876): the first mass-produced sleeping bag

Pryce Pryce-Jones was a draper in Newtown, mid-Wales, and one of the inventors of mail-order retail: he sold Welsh flannel and wool goods by catalogue to customers across the British Empire. In 1876 he patented the Euklisia Rug, a wool blanket with a pocket sewn at one end that held an inflatable rubber pillow. The blanket folded over the sleeper and fastened along the edge. It was warm, cheap to make on Welsh looms, and the first sleeping bag anyone produced by the thousand.

His biggest customer was the Russian army, which ordered about 60,000 rugs for troops in the Russo-Turkish War. When the Bulgarian fortress at Plevna fell in 1877 the order was cancelled with around 17,000 rugs still in stock, and Pryce-Jones sold those cheaply to British charities as bedding for the poor. He also sold the rug to the British Army, to settlers in the Australian outback and to missionaries in the Congo. No original is known to survive, and the design was rebuilt in recent years from the patent drawings. The point for a modern reader is what it was made of: wool, rubber and thread, every part of which could be repaired.

1917: an artifact from the wool-bag era

Before Lucky Sheep existed, its founder went looking for how people slept outdoors before nylon, and found the page below. It is the January 1917 issue of Forest and Stream, a hunting-and-fishing journal founded in 1873, and the article is titled “Keeping Warm: an important eight hour question that concerns every out-of-doors sleeper,” signed only “Old Camper.” It was written in the middle of the First World War, when wool blankets and blanket bags were standard issue on every front.

Read it closely and the physics is already there. The author explains that warmth is not a property of the blanket but of the still air trapped in it; that a loosely woven wool blanket beats a dense carpet of the same weight because its interstices fill with air; and that “the hair or fur of animals is an instance of how nature has solved the problem.” He also warns against too much covering, which makes the sleeper sweat and then chill. That is a moisture argument, made a century before anyone measured a shell fabric’s breathability.

Down, zippers and the mummy shape (1930s to 1950s)

Three changes arrived between the wars. Down-filled bags, which European expedition outfitters had made in small numbers since the turn of the century, became the choice for serious mountaineering because nothing else gave as much loft per ounce. The zipper, patented in its modern form in 1917 and common on clothing by the 1930s, replaced the pins, buttons and ties of the blanket bag and let a sleeper get in and out of a sewn-shut sack. And the tapered mummy shape, narrow at the feet and hooded at the head, cut the volume of air the body had to heat. The US Army issued a down-and-feather mummy bag to mountain troops in the Second World War; the 1953 Everest expedition slept in down.

Down solved weight and gave up moisture tolerance. Wet down clumps and stops insulating, and a down bag cannot be dried by a fire without cooking the shell. The trade was worth it at altitude, where the air is dry and every ounce is paid for. It is a worse trade in a damp forest at 35°F, which is where most of us actually camp.

Nylon and synthetics (1950s to today)

Nylon, introduced by DuPont in the late 1930s and freed from wartime use after 1945, replaced cotton and wool shells because it was lighter, stronger for its weight and did not rot. Polyester fibrefill followed in the 1960s and 1970s, then hollow and crimped fibres that mimicked down’s loft at lower cost. The backpacking boom of the 1970s put a nylon-shelled, synthetic- or down-filled mummy bag in every outfitter, and production moved to large factories in Asia. Ratings were finally standardised in 2002 with EN 13537, now ISO 23537-1, which gives a comfort, limit and extreme temperature from a heated-manikin test.

What the synthetic bag gave up is less advertised. Nylon holds about 4 to 4.5 percent of its weight in moisture at 65 percent humidity and polyester about 0.4 percent, against 13 to 16 percent for wool (published textile data). A nylon shell over polyester fill does not absorb the night’s half-litre of vapour; it either passes it, if the shell is thin and the air outside is dry, or condenses it against the inside of the shell, which is the clammy feeling of waking in a synthetic bag. Torn baffles, failed coatings and delaminated shells are rarely worth repairing, so a bag that once lasted a lifetime became a product with a lifespan.

The modern return to wool

Lucky Sheep’s Rewilder is, structurally, the 1917 blanket bag with a century of tailoring: a tapered backpacking cut, 2 or 3 inches of US wool batting, a beeswax-treated organic cotton shell and a merino or WeatherWool liner. It is field-rated to 20°F in the 2-inch loft and 10°F in the 3-inch (not ISO-tested; see how we rate our bags). A Standard 2-inch bag weighs 4 lb, which is roughly three times a 20°F down quilt. That is the honest cost, and it is the same cost Nansen paid.

What the ounces buy is what the old designs had. Wool absorbs up to 16 percent of its weight in vapour without feeling wet, and it releases about 960 kJ of heat per kilogram of water it takes up (see heat of sorption), so the bag warms slightly as the night gets damp instead of going clammy. It insulates when wet, dries by a fire, is silent when you roll over, and can be patched and restitched for decades. A cotton shell tears and gets sewn; a wool batt gets re-lofted, not thrown away. Lucky Sheep bags and the felt bedroll are made in Burnsville, North Carolina, and carry a lifetime workmanship guarantee.

So who invented the sleeping bag? The people who lived where it was cold and wet, and who understood that the bag has to breathe as well as insulate. The century of nylon was a detour that solved weight brilliantly and moisture not at all. If you want to see both halves of the problem in one object, put your hand inside a fur-lined caribou bag, a Euklisia Rug or a Rewilder. They are the same idea.

Reviewed August 2026. Historical dates from published accounts of the Pryce-Jones patent, the Nansen, Scott and Shackleton expeditions, and the Forest and Stream archive; textile moisture figures from published textile data.