Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: First modern elastic brassiere patented by Mary Phelps Jacob
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (372) · November 13th, 2009 · Add a Comment
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Today in History – November 13, 1913 – Mary Phelps Jacobs invents modern bra. After tiring of barbaric corsets with whaleback bones and steel rods, Mary Phelps Jacobs, a New York socialite, took two silk handkerchiefs and some pink ribbon and fashioned herself the very first backless bra. She used the natural bias of the silk to provide the elasticity. On November 3, 1914, she was awarded a patent for the “Backless Brassiere”. Later she sold the brassiere patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut for $1,500, who is reported to have made $15 million dollars from the bra over the next 30 years. Anne L. Macdonald, author of Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America, notes that Jacobs was a descendant of inventor Robert Fulton and quotes Jacobs’ autobiography on this: “I believe my ardour for invention springs from his [Fulton's] loins. I can’t say that the brassiere will ever take as grat a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it.”
See the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on women inventors and gender equity.
Also on this date in 1971, Mariner 9 becomes the first spaceprobe to orbit another planet.
Tags: Engineering Design · Gender Equity · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Industrial Design
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