When people think of chastity belts and devices, the origin of these items seems to be set as being during the so called 'Dark Ages ‘when men went off to war in the Crusades and wanted to keep their women faithful while they were away.  This has no basis in fact though and the first actual depiction of a chastity device as a physical object was in 1405, in an engineering type manual of the time. It is believed that this was a fantasy type drawing showing an object of torture by the artist and that the first real chastity device were the ones designed in 1870 as devices to prevent children from masturbating. It was believed that masturbation created some forms of feeble-mindedness, imbecility and even insanity. The device was patented by Henry Tunnessen in 1909. There was a spate of designs filed in the patent offices from this time until around the early 1930s when medical research had established that masturbation was not a cause