ENGINEERS SHOW THEIR INGENUITY, BRA NONE

ITS anyone’s guess how you explain to your wife that as a successful aircraft engineer you’ve been moved from building war planes to building the world’s first strapless bra for a busty Hollywood starlet named Jane Russell.

But in the early 1940s that’s what confronted three engineers employed by America’s somewhat eccentric Howard Hughes, an aircraft manufacturer and flyer with aspirations of becoming the world’s richest man, its greatest aviator, most famous film producer, and even its best golfer.

Yet despite such highfalutin aims, Hughes ultimately became remarkably reclusive, working out of heavily-guarded floors of hotels he’d rent for months at a time rather than from offices, and often making important phone calls on payphones that couldn’t be tapped.

In one hotel in Vancouver only he and his body-guard occupied the entire top floor, his staff two other floors below, and he put in his own ‘clean electricity’ generator, and sealed windows against germs.

And in another in Las Vegas in which he occupied an entire wing for several months, when the manager finally suggested it was time he vacated, Hughes bought the hotel, sacked the manager and stayed.

Hughes’ biggest 1940s wartime contract was to design and build a monstrous flying boat that could carry either 750 troops, two Sherman tanks or tonnes of military supplies in a hold more than 60m long and 9m high.

Its wings would span nearly 100m – the length of a football field – and eight massive 3000hp engines would drive it 4800km at 320kmh.

The American government advanced Hughes US$18,000,000, but prevented him using wartime rationed aluminium: he had to build the world’s biggest aeroplane from wood.

Hughes chose American fir, and newspapers quickly dubbed his officially-titled H-4 Hercules, The Spruce Goose.

Hughes also loved the movie industry, and was invited to finance and direct a lusty B&W flick to be called The Outlaw, in which Jane Russell was to display her ample 100cm-plus bosom to best advantage.

He agreed, and in a scene of a romp in a haystack with co-star Jack Buetel directed Jane Russell to be seemingly spilling out of her blouse – while neither allowing her brassiere to be seen, nor for her to appear not to be wearing one.

So he conceived the idea of a strapless bra, and took three engineers off building wartime planes to create it. After months sweating over slide-rules, sewing machines, wire and fittings with Miss Russell, they triumphantly announced success.

Although delayed by the censors for two years, the movie on release made Jane Russell an instant household name, earned Hughes a small fortune, and drove millions of men to drink, monasteries, and in some cases blindness.

(Russell later revealed in her autobiography that in the end she’d dodged wearing the strapless bra in the film. “It was a mediocre fit,” she wrote. “I just wore my own with the straps down… I knew Howard wasn’t going to undress me to find out.”)

Hughes returned to completing the Spruce Goose, but the war ended before it was finished and the government demanded its $18m back – their contract had required him to prove the plane could fly.

The aviator fought back and poured US$7m of his own into further development, and on November 2 1947 in front of invited Press, politicians and film stars took the controls of the Spruce Goose himself on Long Beach Harbour in California for ‘taxiing trials.’

To everyone’s amazement, on its third run the Spruce Goose suddenly roared into the air and flew at 21m above the water. But after just 1.6km, Hughes cut all eight engines and splashed back into the harbour. When asked by an onboard engineer if he’d intended the plane to fly, Hughes allegedly replied: “You will never know.”

But importantly because it did fly, Hughes could keep the government’s $18m. While the plane never flew again, Hughes maintained it in flying condition in an air-conditioned hangar that cost him $1m a year until his death in 1976.

The Spruce Goose later went on public display in Long Beach, and in the early 1990s was dismantled and taken to the Evergreen Aviation Museum at McMinnville in Oregon. It took over ten patient years to re-assemble there, where it’s back on public display once more.