Separate groups of Chinese language and American scientists are reported to be growing physique armour utilizing the silk from genetically modified silkworms. The researchers modified the genes of silkworms to make them produce spider silk as a substitute of their very own silk.
Harnessing the properties of spider silk has been a longstanding purpose as a result of the fabric is as robust as metal, but additionally extremely elastic. Nonetheless, the thought of utilizing silk to make bulletproof vests just isn’t a brand new concept. As an alternative, it goes again centuries.
The invention of the silk bulletproof vest is commonly credited to the American doctor George Emory Goodfellow (1855–1910), following his statement that silk was impenetrable to bullets.
However the concept was in truth proposed greater than two centuries earlier by the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), greatest referred to as inventor of calculus and binary arithmetic. Let’s start with the recognized historical past.
As a medical practitioner within the American frontier city of Tombstone, Arizona, in the course of the late 1800s, Dr Goodfellow noticed his justifiable share of gunshot wounds. A number of the instances he noticed revealed “the exceptional tenacity of silk fibre and its resistance to the penetrative energy of a bullet”.
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On April 3 1882, beneath the heading “Silk as Bullet Proof”, The Tombstone Epitaph reported Dr Goodfellow’s shock at discovering two buckshot pellets embedded within the folds of the silk handkerchief of shotgun sufferer Billy Grounds. Nonetheless, different pellets had penetrated his hat, face, and cranium.
The report concluded that “a silken (armour) will be the subsequent invention”. 5 years later, Dr Goodfellow revealed additional observations in “Notes on the Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets” in a journal referred to as The Southern California Practioneer.
In its pages, he recounted two additional instances wherein a gunshot sufferer’s silk handkerchief was discovered to be immune to bullets, a lot in order that the bullet had pushed the (largely undamaged) handkerchief into the sufferer’s physique, making it look as if it had been purposely stuffed into the wound to cease the bleeding.
Utilizing Goodfellow’s findings, the Catholic priest Casimir Zeglen (1869–1927) would later invent a silk bulletproof vest. However the potential for silk as ballistic physique armour had been recognised greater than two centuries earlier, by Leibniz.
Though greatest recognized in his personal day – and even within the present-day – as a mathematician and thinker, Leibniz was a common genius who made progressive contributions to quite a few disciplines. He wrote tons of of manuscript pages on army issues, however revealed none of them. Most of those writings stay unpublished even at this time.
Kobby Dagan
In considered one of these little-known writings, unassumingly entitled “Plan for a army
manufacturing course of”, Leibniz sought to establish a cloth appropriate for making a
light-weight, versatile, bulletproof cloth. He briefly thought of metallic wires, layered metallic sheets, and layered “goldbeater’s pores and skin”, which is a cloth produced from ox gut. Nonetheless, he devoted most of his consideration to silk.
Whereas Goodfellow had noticed the impenetrability of silk by bullets, Leibniz
by no means had. As an alternative, he thought silk was probably the most promising materials for a bulletproof cloth because of being light-weight, versatile, and robust. “Of all of the supplies we use for materials, and which may be obtained in amount, there’s nothing firmer than a silk thread,” he wrote.
Noting that silk was by no means firmer than within the cocoon, “the place the silk continues to be gathered in the best way that nature produced it”, Leibniz proposed making a cloth fashioned of silkworm cocoons tightly pressed along with a bit of glue.
He realised that whereas such a sheet couldn’t simply be pierced, as a result of tightly-woven silk within the cocoons, it will be susceptible to ripping the place one
cocoon met the following. Thus, he inferred {that a} bullet wouldn’t make a gap within the cloth, however as a substitute tear no matter cocoon it hit from the encircling ones, and drive it into the physique, much like what Goodfellow would observe with the silk handkerchief two centuries later.
Leibniz’s answer to the tearing downside was to suggest layering sheets of pressed silkworm cocoons on prime of one another. He illustrated this with a rudimentary diagram of a row of circles stacked on prime of each other in a lattice association, the place a small interstice is left between adjoining circles.
Layering cocoons in such a hexagonal packing association ensures that the
weak elements of 1 layer are coated by the robust elements of one other. This manner, the material wouldn’t tear or be pierced when hit by a bullet. The outcome, Leibniz claimed, could be a cloth appropriate for masking virtually the entire physique, particularly if it was made to be outsized, affording the wearer freedom of motion.
Leibniz by no means realised his proposal to create bulletproof clothes utilizing silk. He was no engineer and wouldn’t have been in a position to manufacture the material himself. What’s extra, he typically struggled to seek out engineers able to manufacturing his innovations. For instance, he additionally designed a calculating machine which, regardless of his lifelong efforts to get it constructed, by no means materialised into a totally functioning prototype.
His concept for silk bulletproof clothes due to this fact didn’t get off the drafting board. His manuscript was quietly filed away with tens of 1000’s of others, destined to anticipate later discoveries relatively than to affect them.
