RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006
From: London, England
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Daddysredhead
I admit that for $45 per bra, these bitches should be made of a titanium alloy!
I confess I tend to agree with you. I am often staggered by how much bras cost (those used by my girlfriends, of course, as I have no use for one at present), but ...
There used to be, years back, a BBC2 documentary series called "The Works", which explained how various things worked, what their history was, how modern materials had altered them, etc. My 2 fave episodes were one called “Works Only Once” and one called “Steady On!”.
The former was about devices which worked only once, like the ring-less aluminium can ring-pull, a triumph of microscopic scale technology, where even the laser-etched shaped of the weakened cut-out had to be accurate to within a few microns, and a very specific shape – if you etch it with a “V” pattern then you get a nice clean “break” when you open it, but it’s too weak when subjected to internal stresses, meaning that your 1,000,000 cans of Coke in the back of the truck all tend to pop themselves when you go over a bump. But if you make the cut a straight edged etch then you stop that, but get a jagged cut edge, so people hurt themselves when they drink from the can. Solution? A cut that starts off as a “V” on the sides, but instead of tapering to a point, tapers to a flat edge, so you get good edge definition and good vibration damage resistance.
Next? The jet fighter ejector seat, a marvel that “works only once” ... and so on.
But the other episode that utterly amazed me was the “Steady On!” one, which investigated ... bras! They had some very entertaining footage of well-endowed young ladies bouncing around in slow motion, but the expert they got in was “chief design engineer” at Gossard, and you simply would not believe both the technology that goes into a good bra, nor the various factors it has to cope with. So it has to work differently in different planes, to allow some movement in one plane, but less in another (lack of side-to-side movement becomes uncomfortable, too much up and down movement damages breast tissue). Then you have the issue that women are rarely exactly a certain bra size, so it has to be able to cope with parameters within plus or minus 20% of its defined range (try that with, say, a 747 and you’ll have a pile of 747 dust in seconds flat). Then there’s the point that, even for the same bra size, 2 different women can have radically different BMI, so they need to factor that into the mix. And so on and do forth – at one point the guy said that, for any given bra, there are in excess of 50 different (and often contradictory) design parameters. Oh and even when you've done it all, and got the perfect bra ... it has to be washable! So your materials technology has to be able to cope with that. Oh, and heavy-handed clowns like me, who just rip the things off whenever I get the chance :)
It was an utterly superb documentary, and one I’d gladly watch again, and not just for the bouncing boulders either. So spare a thought for your poor, maligned bra – it’s doing several jobs at once, has to do them under difficult conditions, and does it all in a pretty thankless environment ... “sounds like my life”, as one of the women said :)
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RE: I Admit It I........ - 
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