by Luke Tagg

Perhaps one of the more unheralded inventions, the invention of the brassiere relieved some 350 year's worth of pain and suffering at the hands of that notorious torture device, the corset.

The first modern brassiere to receive a patent was invented by New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob in 1913. Mary had purchased a new evening gown for a social function, but found that the corset she was wearing stuck out all over the place. Corsets were the acceptable undergarment of the time, and were made from whaleback bones and steel rods which were highly visible under tight dresses.

Mary gathered up some silk handkerchiefs and pink ribbon, spent a couple of minutes tying them together, and the brassiere was born.

Mary's new undergarment was the perfect foil for the new fashions starting to spring up, and she was inundated with requests from friends and family. Mary decided to make it all official, and was awarded a patent for the "Backless Brassiere" on 3 November 1914.

Mary may have been blessed with intelligence, but she fell far short in the financial acuity stakes. Bored with running the new bra-producing business she sold the brassiere patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for $1500.

Warner Brothers (not the movie ones) eventually grossed some $15-million from sales of the bra over the next thirty years.

The corset was finally done away with in 1917, when the US War Industries Board called on women to stop buying corsets. The result was 28 000 tons of freed-up metal.

Mary Phelps Jacob died in obscurity in 1970, but not before seeing the bra - as it was dubbed during the '30s - go through a number of changes. Women demanded tight, chest-flattening bras during the 1920s; when Warner introduced the all-elastic bra during the '30s, they opted for curves. By the Cold War years, breasts were launched in pointy cups eerily shaped like munitions.

Mary was also was politically active and founded the organization Women Against War.