It is easy to take things for granted, think we know how they are formed, and forget the extraordinary causes of ordinary things. Stories of inventions are often hard to verify because every new idea stands on the old shoulder and becomes a great urban legend. Added to the trouble, some real stories are not very sure when someone else, so intuition makes you reach your merchant. But stories of simple home objects sitting in plain sight can tell us more about the past than we can imagine. Here are some possible lessons for easy use.
There’s really no evidence that women burned bras in the 60s of the last century, but the legend has continued. Modern corset style bra, but not creating constraints, women are an invention that provides support and liberation, a plump party girl created by plump party girls. One night in early 1910s, a young socialite Mary Phelps Jacobs (the name of Caresse, Crosby in most of her life) going to an event, the lack of danceability and cramp her bra she flapper she MacGyvered a halter top ribbon and handkerchief. Jacobs helped her friend, when she knew that she could be a real go, she applied for a patent, opened a small “sweatshops” (this is the garment manufacturing industry after all) as an independent boss, not by her husband.
But Jacobs didn’t have a lifelong commitment to be a manufacturer. Through an ex boyfriend, she sold the patent Warner Brothers Corset Company (no concern for filmmakers) and 1500-a dollars less than $36000 in today’s purchasing power. Jacobs was free from the only constraint in her life. She and her husband, Harry Crosby, moved to Paris for some time, where they were caught in a lost generation. She has knowledge and romantic affairs and brilliant like Henri Cartier and Buckminster Bresson. Fuller, for allegedly written by Henry Miller, and set up an English news, published a lot of people to create a modern.
Although inventing bras on Jacobs’s fascinating track is just a teenager’s stop, it does signal what she’s going to do next. Not only did she not dance through Europe, but patent applications were also made by her first published work, in which she described the benefits of bras, “this may be some concluding remarks that it does not put people where they do not need it.”.”
A version of the story first appeared in the Pacific Standard in May / June 2017. Now subscribe and get eight questions for the year or buy a single copy of the magazine.