In 1911, Myra Farrell (born Myra Welsh) was awarded an Australian patent for a new corset design; a ‘stayette’ that had no wood, metal or bone ‘stays’. Until then the rigidity of stays had created the desired hour-glass silhouette that caused women health problems ranging from a shortness of breath to rib injuries and internal bleeding.
Myra Farrell’s Irish father and Australian mother emigrated from County Clare to Australia in the 1880s with their five children. They first lived in Silverton, near Broken Hill, where they opened a school. For a time they employed Dame Mary Gilmore as a teacher. They soon moved to Broken Hill where they opened St Peter’s School.
Myra Farrell was curious about how things worked from an early age. She wanted to make everything work better and to make life easier. Myra’s first invention, aged ten, was a self-locking safety pin, and the idea for it came to her in a dream. This became her method of working: she would notice the need for an improvement or a new invention and sleep on it. Immediately she woke she would write down whatever had come to her in her dreams, on whatever surface was immediately available, even if it was the wall. She famously wrote her dreams down from right to left and (if on paper), held them in front of the mirror to make sense of them.
Her first patent, in 1905, was for a seamstress’ device that could copy a clothing pattern onto fabric. Her design for an inhalant was for personal use, to help with a respiratory condition, but it led to her meeting and marrying William Taylor, whose tuberculosis she helped to treat. Even before Taylor died in 1912, his illness made it necessary for Myra to work to support their two children. She turned her full attention to inventing.
The stayette was originally designed to help women with scoliosis: curvature of the spine, but it was a godsend to many, since the old corsets restricted movement as well as impacted on their health. The women who went to work to replace enlisted men during WWI were particularly grateful. Australian underwear manufacturer Berlei turned the stayette down, so Myra found a manufacturer in England. Berlei later copied her design.
Myra married William Farrell in 1919. By now she had many more patented inventions, including an improved pram hood, a press-stud that didn’t require stitching, and a military barricade that was ‘rifle, shell and machine-gun proof.’
At the time of her death in 1957, Myra Juliette Farrell held more than two dozen patents.
Audio transcript available.