A Team Effort.

Last week one of the young men who was being confirmed at my temple shared the results of his project, which was to research famous Jewish engineers. He has had a lifelong interest in science and engineering and will enter engineering school this fall. He found that although it was easy to identify famous Jewish mathematicians and physicists, it was difficult to find famous Jewish engineers. He surmised that this was because engineering is most often a team effort, so it is less likely that a single individual would hold a patent that made them famous.

Once I decided to write about the idea of teamwork, I followed his path to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office web site, where I discovered an article about the National Inventors Hall of Fame. There, I found a team of women who were inducted into the Hall of Fame this year because of their invention, patent 4, 174, 717, the “athletic brassiere.” These women, Lisa Lindahl, Polly Smith and Hinda Miller, were not engineers. In fact, they all had degrees in art or education. But together they “engineered’ the first sports bra, which changed the lives of generations of women.

Lindahl was a runner, looking for a bra that would support women’s breasts. After drawing up a list of requirements, “including stable straps, no chafing from seams or clasps, breathable fabric and enough compression to prevent excessive movement,” she asked her childhood friend, Smith, who was working as a costume designer, to help her. Miller, who was working as an assistant designer with Smith, joined their efforts. Smith finally sewed two jock straps together, which, after Lindahl successfully tested it on a run, became the protype for their invention.

According to Runner’s World Magazine, “The sports bra has had an immeasurable, cumulative impact on the lives of ordinary women.” Fifty years after the passage of Title IX, it is hard to imagine what women’s participation in athletics would have been like if these three women had not worked together as a team.