OTTO TITZLING

According to an inventive history of the undergarment that is now widely believed, Titzling came to invent the item while living in a New York boardinghouse in 1912. One of his neighbors was a buxom opera singer named Swanhilda Olafson, and the structural engineering problems she presented inspired Titzling to create a contraption to uphold this lady's ample bosom. In the early 1930s, a French fellow named Phillip de Brassiere began producing a similar undergarment. Titzling sued, but Brassiere won in court, and that is why today we call a lady's frontal uplifter a brassiere instead of a titzling.