Article : Body armour made from silk is being developed – but this apparently cutting-edge idea is centuries old
Harnessing the properties of spider silk has been a longstanding aim because the material is as strong as steel, yet also highly elastic. However, the idea of using silk to make bulletproof vests is not a new idea. Instead, it goes back centuries.
Lloyd Strickland Professor of Philosophy and Intellectual History at Manchester Met, writing in The Conversation Published: April; 9, 2024
Harnessing the properties of spider silk has been a longstanding aim because the material is as strong as steel, yet also highly elastic. However, the idea of using silk to make bulletproof vests is not a new idea. Instead, it goes back centuries.
The invention of the silk bulletproof vest is often credited to the American physician George Emory Goodfellow (1855–1910), following his observation that silk was impenetrable to bullets.
But the idea was in fact proposed more than two centuries earlier by the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), best known as inventor of calculus and binary arithmetic. Let’s begin with the known history.
As a medical practitioner in the American frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona, during the late 1800s, Dr Goodfellow saw his fair share of gunshot wounds. Some of the cases he observed revealed
the remarkable tenacity of silk fibre and its resistance to the penetrative power of a bullet
Read the Full Article in The Conversation
Associated Articles
Separate teams of Chinese and American scientists are reported to be developing body armour using the silk from genetically modified silkworms. The researchers modified the genes of silkworms to make them produce spider silk instead of their own silk.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202309/22/WS650d350da310d2dce4bb7453.html
