Braces weren’t a single invention. They evolved over roughly 2,700 years, from gold bands hammered around teeth by ancient metalworkers to the bracket-and-wire systems orthodontists use today. Each era contributed a piece of the puzzle: a material, a technique, or a biological insight that moved the field forward.
Ancient Attempts to Straighten Teeth
The earliest known dental appliances date to around 650 B.C. in what is now central Italy. The Etruscans, skilled goldsmiths, crafted flat gold bands custom-fitted around individual teeth. Each band was a seamless loop, shaped to encircle a single tooth, and multiple loops were joined together with invisible cold welds. These devices weren’t braces in the modern sense. They were designed to hold false teeth in place or stabilize teeth loosened by gum disease. But the core concept, using a fitted band to control a tooth’s position, is the same principle orthodontics still relies on.
The technique for securing a false tooth was remarkably sophisticated. A small gold band was shaped into a setting, similar to how a goldsmith mounts a gemstone, and the replacement tooth was pressed into it. The rectangular setting prevented the tooth from rotating and kept it snug. Lateral bands were then pressed around the neighboring natural teeth using relatively pure, soft gold that could be molded tightly by hand.
Ancient Egyptians and Romans took a simpler approach, wrapping catgut (a cord made from animal intestines) or gold wire around teeth to close gaps. Archaeologists have found mummies with metal wire still wrapped around their teeth, evidence that people have been trying to fix crooked smiles for millennia.
The First True Orthodontic Appliance
The leap from crude tooth-binding to something recognizable as orthodontics came in 1728, when French dentist Pierre Fauchard described an appliance called the “bandeau” in his landmark dental textbook. The bandeau was an arch made of silver or gold, shaped to fit the curve of the teeth. It was tied to individual teeth using waxed silk ligatures, and those ties applied steady pressure to push teeth into better alignment. This was a conceptual breakthrough: rather than just holding teeth in place, Fauchard’s device actively moved them.
The bandeau’s design influenced orthodontics for the next two centuries. Its basic architecture, a shaped arch exerting force on teeth through attachments, became the template that later inventors refined.
Edward Angle and the Birth of Modern Orthodontics
Orthodontics didn’t exist as a distinct specialty until Edward H. Angle essentially created it. In 1900, he opened the world’s first postgraduate school of orthodontics in St. Louis, the Edward H. Angle School of Orthodontia. Before Angle, straightening teeth was just one thing a general dentist might attempt. After him, it was a discipline with its own training, its own theory, and its own classification system.
Angle’s most lasting contribution was a simple way to categorize crooked bites based on how the first molars line up. That classification system is still used today. He also developed a series of increasingly refined appliances, including the “E-Arch,” which built directly on Fauchard’s bandeau concept but used more precise metalwork and better mechanical principles. His later designs introduced the edgewise bracket, a small metal slot attached to a band on each tooth, through which a rectangular wire could be threaded. This bracket-and-wire combination is the direct ancestor of the braces millions of people wear today.
Gluing Brackets to Teeth
For decades, brackets had to be welded or soldered onto metal bands that wrapped around each tooth. This made braces bulky and time-consuming to install. The idea of gluing a bracket directly onto the tooth surface changed everything.
The first attempts at direct bonding happened in the late 1950s and 1960s. A graduate student at the University of North Carolina named Mitchell treated five patients with at least one bonded bracket in 1959 as part of his master’s thesis. Then in 1966, Herbert Cueto at the Eastman Dental Center developed a technique using a liquid adhesive and a silite filler to bond brackets directly to enamel. Direct bonding eliminated the need for full metal bands on every tooth, making braces smaller, more comfortable, and easier to keep clean. It’s the reason modern braces look so different from the heavy metalwork of earlier generations.
How NASA Helped Make Braces More Comfortable
One of the most significant upgrades to braces came from an unlikely source: aerospace research. Traditional archwires were made of stainless steel, which tends to kink when bent. Once kinked, the wire loses its ability to exert consistent pressure on teeth, so orthodontists had to adjust or replace wires frequently.
A company called 3M developed an orthodontic wire from Nitinol, a nickel-titanium alloy originally explored in connection with NASA research. Nitinol is a shape-memory material, meaning it can be bent dramatically and still return to its original shape without kinking. In practical terms, this meant an orthodontist could thread a Nitinol wire through severely misaligned brackets, and the wire would steadily pull teeth into position over weeks or months without losing force. Patients reported less discomfort, needed fewer office visits, and in many cases could use the same wire for their entire treatment rather than going through multiple replacements.
Clear Aligners: Braces Without Brackets
The most radical rethinking of braces came from people with no orthodontic training at all. In the late 1990s, Zia Chishti, a Stanford University student, had just finished wearing traditional braces. When his orthodontist gave him a plastic retainer to maintain his results, Chishti had a simple realization: if a rigid plastic tray could hold teeth in position, a series of slightly different trays could gradually move them.
Chishti teamed up with three fellow Stanford students to turn the idea into reality. Two of them, Kelsey Wirth and the computer graphics specialists Brian Freyburger and Apostolos Lerios, tackled the technical challenge of modeling a person’s bite digitally and then generating a sequence of custom trays, each one shifting the teeth a fraction of a millimeter further. They worked out of a garage in Menlo Park, California, using CAD modeling and early 3D printers to prototype what they called “incremental retainers.”
They founded Align Technology in 1997, and Invisalign hit the market shortly after. The product turned orthodontics into a software problem as much as a dental one: scan a patient’s teeth, model the desired outcome, and let an algorithm calculate each intermediate step.
Why Braces Work at All
Every version of braces, from Etruscan gold bands to clear aligners, relies on the same biological trick. When steady pressure is applied to a tooth, the bone around it remodels. On the side where the tooth is being pushed, specialized cells break down bone to make room. On the opposite side, other cells build new bone to fill the gap left behind. This cycle of breakdown and rebuilding is what lets teeth move through solid bone without falling out.
The process is controlled by a cascade of molecular signals that coordinate inflammation, bone removal, and bone regeneration. It’s also why orthodontic treatment takes months or years: the bone can only remodel at a certain pace, and pushing too hard risks damaging the tooth root or the surrounding tissue. Modern orthodontics has gotten faster and more comfortable over the centuries, but it’s still fundamentally limited by the speed of human biology.