The contraption, grimly termed “ the guillotine,” looked like a bite-sized version of the medieval stocks: the spider is placed in a wooden yoke, with its abdomen protruding out one side, and its legs and head the other. Camboué invented a device to reel the spider’s butter-yellow silk right out of its abdomen. Its silk shines saffron yellow in the sunlight. With its legs extended, it’s the size of a human hand, and its webs are sized to match. The Golden Orb Weaver is a striking creature. Paul Camboué invented a device to reel the spider’s butter-yellow silk right out of its abdomen. Proselytizing in Madagascar, he became fascinated with the Golden Orb Weaver. This time it was the Jesuit missionary Paul Camboué’s obsession that led the way. In the 1800s, France made another attempt to turn spider silk into an industry. ![]() Apparently, the material quickly tore in every direction, a royal wardrobe malfunction that humiliated the king. When Louis XIV was presented with a spider silk garment, however, he was not nearly so impressed. Soon spiders would replace silkworms, and France would lead the way. It easily takes all sorts of Colours and one may as well make large pieces of it, as the Stockings and Gloves which I here present you.” Bon was convinced that he was at the forefront of a new industry. The amateur weaver was quite satisfied with his results: “And by getting together a great many of these Bags, it was that I made this new Silk, which is in no ways inferior in beauty to common Silk. (No doubt the neighbors were delighted at the chance to profit from his folly.) He was able to gather enough material by promising his neighbors to pay the price of silk, pound for pound, for the spider egg sacs abandoned in the corners of their cottages. In the 1700s, French naturalist Bon de Saint Hilaire presented a set of spider-silk gloves and stockings to the French Academy. ![]() No one has yet succeeded in recruiting the archetypal weaver as an agent of the textile industry. No one has yet succeeded in recruiting the archetypal weaver as an agent of the textile industry.ĭespite all this, the spider stays off our looms. In antiquity, the Greeks and Romans stopped up their battle wounds with spider-silk poultices. In the Solomon Islands, indigenous people use an ingenious setup involving a kite, a line, and a spider-silk lure to catch the elusive needlefish, whose mouth is too narrow to be snagged on a traditional hook. Humans, too, have long made their own use of spider silk. It encases an air bubble in its web, and returns to it from its hunting to snatch an occasional breath. There is even one species of spider that lives underwater. Some spiders can even balloon on silk, floating for miles on twirling plumes. Spiders are certainly able to make good use of it: for cocoons, nest-linings, pheromone trails, sticky capture-spirals, and lifelines, among other purposes. Imagine the cloth you could weave with those tremulous, gossamer threads. For another, spider silk is a true wonder of nature-as strong as steel, as light as a feather. ![]() And everywhere they go, they spin their webs. They live pretty much everyone on earth (including my apartment). Why weave silk out of spider webs? For one thing, spiders are more common than silkworms. But for centuries, people have been captivated by the quest for even stranger and more elusive fabric: spider silk. It’s difficult to believe that the threads that make up the cloth were woven by little white worms, extracted from the fortresses they spun as they embarked on the metamorphosis from larva to moth. It is a singularly satisfying thing to touch: as light as a breeze, as smooth as water. A few years ago, my mother gave me a silk scarf.
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