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A little over 100 years ago, the word “textile” meant a fabric produced from a plant fiber such as cotton, flax, or jute; from an animal protein such as wool or silk; or from some combination of these. Typically, fibers were spun or twisted into yarn, which then could be woven, braided, knit, or felted — and used in apparel, furnishings, and various industrial applications.
Today, man-made fibers have replaced natural fibers in everyday items and are widely used in industries that were nonexistent or just getting started 100 years ago. These high-tech textiles are vital in aerospace, transportation, sports, and energy generation; and are of growing importance in the construction, medical, and industrial fields. They are also working their way into civilian and military apparel to inform us about ourselves and our environment, and they are finding their way into the art world for their special qualities and beauty.
Today’s “high performance” textiles touch virtually all aspects of our lives. They challenge our conception of what a textile “is” and what its function might be. While decidedly new, these fabrics are also old. Old because many of the materials used in these fabrics, like fiberglass and carbon fiber, have been around for over 50 years. But these fabrics are new because of their special properties, such as strength, elasticity, durability, and impenetrability, which are constantly being refined and manipulated in innovative ways.
How are the new fabrics better? What materials have they replaced? What kinds of things do the new fabrics make possible that weren’t possible before?
Take the example of windmills. The first American windmill used to generate electricity was build by Charles F. Brush in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1888. The diameter of the wooden blade span (“rotor diameter”) was 50 feet, and the turbine produced 12 kilowatts of power. Today, state-of-the-art wind turbines made from fiberglass and/or carbon can have spans that exceed 300 feet and produce 5 megawatts power (5,000 kilowatts) — enough to meet the electricity needs of 1,400 households.
Consider protective clothing, “body armor,” used by law enforcement and the military. In the 1960s, body armor was made out of steel plates and weighed approximately 15 pounds. Today, it has been replaced by Kevlar™, which not only offers improved impenetrability and wearer comfort, but also weighs one-half as much. On the horizon is another fabric, Spectra™, which is several times stronger and lighter than Kevlar.
In aerospace, an industry that did not exist a century ago, the search is for lighter, stronger materials to reduce fuel usage and total weight. There is also a need for materials that maintain their integrity in outer space, withstanding temperature extremes and flying debris. The newer fibers fill this bill perfectly.
Every culture on earth has its own rich and evolving history of weaving, dying, printing, and assembling fabrics. The oldest recorded fabric dates to around 5000 BC. From the early 1600s until the late 1800s, dramatic improvements were made in the fabric production processes, the machinery used, and the organization of production facilities, yet the fabrics still came from natural fibers that had not been chemically modified.
The man-made textile revolution began as a quest to artificially produce silk, a fiber prized for its luster and highly desired for use in fine apparel and furnishings. In 1891, a Frenchman, Count H. de Chardonnet, dissolved “natural” cellulose made from wood pulp or cotton rags and forced this material through a tiny extrusion hole to create a thin filament for spinning. Two decades later, Chardonnet’s product was first produced in significant quantity, and three decades later, the E.I. du Pont deNemours Company undertook commercial production in earnest. Today we call this fiber “rayon.”
Though man-made, rayon was still created from a natural fiber. The next defining moment in textiles came with the development of a truly synthetic material made from crude oil. This material was nylon. Created by Wallace Carothers, a DuPont scientist, and unveiled at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, nylon caused an instant sensation in women’s hosiery. “Though wholly fabricated from such common raw materials as coal, water, and air,” said Charles Stine, a DuPont vice president, “nylon can be fashioned into filaments as strong as steel, as fine as a spider’s web, yet more elastic than any of the common natural fibers.” The advent of World War II cut short hosiery production, as nylon was quickly adapted to produce parachutes and other gear for the military.
Next came polyester, “the most widely sold manufactured fiber as well as the most heavily recycled polymer in the world.” This petroleum-based fiber was discovered by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in the United Kingdom. Polyester’s stain-resistant, wrinkle-resistant, and quick-drying properties launched what quickly became known as “wash and wear” clothing. Later, in the 1980s, Malden Mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, was the first to manufacture polyester into the ever wildly popular “fleece” with the trade name Polartec™.
It may seem odd to consider glass a fiber, but glass fibers have been in commercial use since the 1930s, when they found their first large-scale commercial application in insulation. In combination with polyester resin, glass fibers were used to produce structural aircraft parts in World War II and sailboat hulls in 1946. In the early 1950s, it was decided to make the Chevy Corvette from Fiberglas™ after a convertible prototype accidentally rolled over without much damage. Since then, thousands of items have been designed with this material. Its ability to be molded, its strength-toweight ratio, its heat resistance, and its lightness are valued properties.
Carbon fiber, a glossy black material that has the highest strength by weight of any known substance, made its industrial debut at the end of the 19th century in the form of carbonized cotton filaments in early incandescent lightbulbs. But it wasn’t until the late 1950s that Dr. Roger Bacon, a scientist at Union Carbide’s Parma Laboratory, produced “long filaments of perfect graphite” that were “only a tenth of the diameter of a human hair, but you could bend them and kink them and they weren’t brittle.” The military and the aerospace industry were quick to grasp the importance of carbon fiber’s lightness, stiffness, and durability in production of planes and vehicles.
The Cold War gave particular impetus to exploiting the use of this material. The military developed ways to use the carbon fiber as a replacement for metals and other heavier composites such as fiberglass. Carbon fiber continues to be used widely today in aerospace applications. It has allowed us to make stealth technology that minimizes radar detection. The Boeing Company is fabricating about 50 percent of its newest airplane, the 787, out of carbon fiber and composites with the expectation that fuel costs will decrease significantly. Carbon fiber is the primary material used in high-end sports equipment such as racing bikes, as well as competitive world-class sailing yachts, racing cars, golf clubs, tennis racquets, and hockey sticks. In the medical field, carbon fiber is being used in prosthetics, implants, wheelchairs, and braces — products where lightness, strength, and durability are valued. Carbon fibers are also being used in concrete to add strength without weight and as reinforcements in buildings.
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), discovered in 1991 by Sumio Iijima, are even smaller, stronger, and more flexible than carbon fibers. The NASA web site lists as future applications: composites, drug delivery, hydrogen storage, micro batteries and machines, solar sails, and more. CNTs are currently used in sporting equiptment like tennis racquets and as a reinforcement material in cuttingedge body armor.
Exciting advances are appearing in a new branch of high-tech textiles, which make the textile “active” or “smart.” Textiles that can actively regulate the wearer’s temperature, change color, keep socks from smelling, or even form electronic devices are all appearing on the market. These textiles get their “smarts” from innovative coatings or by creating new fabric structures from combinations of transmitting fibers and traditional insulating fibers. The electronic textile field uses fiber optics, metal fibers such as stainless steel, or coated fibers to form electronic networks or sensors.
These building blocks can be used to fabricate garments that measure the vital statistics of firemen, soldiers, athletes, and patients comfortably and quickly. Ski jackets are available with sewn-in soft-touch controls that send signals through fabric cables to an iPod™. In these applications, the textiles are adopting the functions of popular electronic devices and are giving new meaning to “wearable computing” or “mobile devices.”
How artists take on the challenge of different materials provides valuable insights into design and use. Artists are capitalizing on the possibilities of high-tech textiles to develop creative and aesthetic applications that reshape our sense of common objects. Textiles that appear to stand on their own or emit light and sound are just some of the ways that artists have created beautiful forms with hidden capabilities that inspire us to view textiles in a new light.
Textiles have long played a vital role in the culture of every society. Today’s textiles underscore this role, redefining the boundaries of what a fabric can be. Just think, instead of making a bag to carry your books, electronics, and other possessions, the future may hold fabrics that do not carry these items, but embody them.
Sources
McQuaide, Matilda, Phillip Reesley, and Susan Brown. Extreme Textiles: Designing for high performance. Princeton: Princeton Architectual Press, 2005.
Common flax (also known as linseed) is a member of the Linaceae family, which includes about 150 plant species widely distributed around the world. The seeds are crushed for oil and meal (the oil is predominantly used in industry — though some species produce edible oil — and the meal is used for animal feed). Parts of the plant stem are used to make fabric.
Jute is a long, soft, shiny plant fiber that can be spun into coarse, strong threads. It is produced from plants in the Corchorus genus.
http://www.windpower.org
http://www.capewind.org
The ability to generate electricity is measured in watts. Watts are very small units, so the terms kilowatt (kW, 1,000 watts), megawatt (MW, 1 million watts), and gigawatt (pronounced “jig-a-watt,” GW, 1 billion watts) are most commonly used to describe the capacity of generating units like wind turbines or other power plants. http://www.awea.org
Hounshell, David A., and John Kenly Smith, Jr. “The Nylon Drama,” Invention and Technology (Fall 1988): 40-55.
http://www.fibersource.com
DuPont later purchased the patent rights in 1945 and gave the material the tradename “Dacron.” Hounshell and Smith, op cit.
http://www.corvettemuseum.com
http://acswebcontent.acs.org
Bacon demonstrated fibers with a tensile strength of 20 Gigapascals (GPa) and Young’s modulus of 700 GPa. Tensile strength measures the amount of force with which a fiber can be pulled before it breaks; Young’s modulus is a measure of a material’s stiffness, or its ability to resist elongation under load. For comparison, steel commonly has a tensile strength of 1-2 GPa and Young’s modulus of 200 GPa.
A single-walled carbon nanotube has a diameter of 1 nm. One nanometer = one billionth of a meter. For comparison, the diameter of a human hair is 50,000 nanometers.
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