the video series this article was inspired by was released in 1998 Discovery.com: Caresse Crosby and the Brassiere by Deborah Baldwin It seems such a little thing, the bra. But it was centuries in the making. The heroine of our story is one Mary Phelps Jacob, a tinkerer who fashioned two silk handkerchiefs and a bit of ribbon into an article of clothing, releasing women from centuries of oppression in the process. But there's no point in telling Jacob's story until you hear what came first. The logical starting point is another, more infamous woman named Catherine de Médici, wife of King Henri II of France during the roaring 1550s. Before de Médicis got busy clobbering Huguenots and conspiring against her political enemies, she was at her husband's side, enforcing a ban on thick waists at court attendances. Her chosen weapon: the corset. The steel corset. It looked like something Joan of Arc would wear into battle. Catherine prescribed it for going to dinner. By the 1820s you could actually buy a "corset mécanique," which freed women from having to call on husbands and servants for help lacing up, because it somehow used pulleys to cram flesh into small spaces. By then, corset designers had turned to such user-friendly materials as whalebone, steel and buckram -- the latter a substance normally used for binding books. In 1826 one dismayed observer complained that "young ladies may be seen with their breasts displaced by being pushed up too high, and frightful wrinkles established between the bosom and the shoulders ... a ridiculous fashion by means of which the body resembles an ant. ..." Was society encasing women in armor in order to protect them from the opposite sex, or to weaken them in the presence of men by bringing on fainting fits? Béatrice Fontanel, author of Corsets et Soutiens-Gorge (that's Corsets and Bras to you), sees the female of that era as a "spectacular useless object ... Laced up, hooked, buttoned, she refuses herself and offers herself in the same instant." When tight lacing fell out of fashion in the early 1850s, women everywhere breathed a sigh of relief. But 10 years later corsets were back. Girls just reaching puberty were supposed to work toward 13-inch waists -- the midriff equivalent of bound feet. At one British boarding school, "stays were compulsory and were sealed up by the mistress on Monday morning, to be removed on Saturday for one hour of ablution." Corsets survived civil wars, industrialization and cultural upheavals. Each decade put its own spin on the cruel garment. The "glove-fitting corset" of 1867 boasted a spring latch. Victorian advertisements touted frisson-inducing electric corsets. At the turn of the century, the Warner brothers -- the bra-makers, not the Hollywood entrepreneurs -- launched the "rust-proof" corset, a true friend to women who fretted when their eyelets ran. By 1912 hot designs involved "clock-spring covered with hard rubber or celluloid." A group of early feminists gathered in Boston to launch the so-called dress reform movement, an upper-class rebellion of the 1860s and '70s that stopped just short of corset-burning. Meeting under the auspices of the New England Women's Club, a study group approved a breast-freeing bodice that could be buttoned to a plain petticoat. No bones, no eyelets, no laces or pulleys. Just a chaste little two-piece under-outfit. Designer Susan Taylor Converse made improvements on an early model, a white cashmere and merino affair given the unfortunate name "Union Under-Flannel." Manufacturers George Frost and George Phelps patented the politically correct undergarment in 1875. Mainstream corset designers clung to the notion that the bosom should be heaved up from below -- with one exception: the "bien-être," a two-piece creation that provided shoulder support from above. Devised by French-born entrepreneur Herminie Cadolle and introduced in Paris in 1889, the bien-être resembled a Victorian bikini. But Cadolle's far-sighted design seems to have been kept a close secret among her select customers. Which brings us back to Mary Phelps Jacob, the young New York debutante who led an American revolt against whalebone in 1914. With help from her French maid, Jacob experimented with handkerchiefs and ribbon, eventually whipping up the first real brassiere. It was "very soft, short and so well designed it separated the breasts naturally," according to Béatrice Fontanel. Friends begged her to make copies. Eventually, Jacob patented her invention and gave herself the more glamorous nom de production of Caresse Crosby. She went commercial but lost her shirt, opting ultimately to marry a millionaire and sell her patent to those same Warner brothers. Caresse Crosby 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. The bra never would have taken off if it hadn't been for World War I, which dealt the corset a body blow by shaking up gender assumptions and putting many women in factories and uniforms for the first time. There was an unexpected payoff in all this, too: When the U.S. War Industries Board called on women to stop buying corsets in 1917, it freed up some 28,000 tons of metal -- enough to build two battleships.