Artificial Spider Silk

Abstract

Id n the spring of 1881 I was a few feet distant from a couple of individuals who were quarreling, George Emery Goodfellow, a physician in Tombstone, Ariz., scribbled in his diary more than a century ago. They began shooting. Two bullets pierced the breast of one gunman, who staggered, fired his pistol, and crumpled onto his back. Examining the body, Goodfellow found that, despite fatal injuries, not a drop of blood had come from either of the two wounds. From the wound in the breast a silk handkerchief protruded, he noted. But when he tugged on the he found the bullet wrapped within it. Evidently, the bullet had torn through the man's clothes, flesh, and bones but had failed to pierce his silk Goodfellow recounted in his Notes on the Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets. Fascinated by this, he documented other cases of silk garments halting projectiles-including one incident in which a silk bandanna tied around a man's neck kept a bullet from severing his carotid artery. The life of this man was, presumably, saved by the handkerchief, Goodfellow wrote.