Silkworm, Silk, and WWII Anecdote

You may ask, “How is the third related to the first two?”

Here is the story.

The four silkworms I have are now in their cocoons. They had drawn everyone’s attention when they were busy growing and then spinning cocoons some 12 days ago. They seem to be doing nothing presently, but that doesn’t stop people from coming to my desk everyday. Yesterday, Vaso took her friend Tom to visit these little creatures. Tom and Vaso marveled at the strength of the silk those little worms made.

Tom then said, “that’s why they made parachutes from silk in World War II.”

I went, “really?” That was definitely new information to me.

“Yes, because silk is very light, yet very strong. Before nylon was successfully made commercially and the price went down, silk was the choice for parachuting fabric. It is better than cotton.”

“Aha, I see.”

“In fact, during WWII, women were urged to donate their silk stockings as raw material for making parachutes.”

“Wow, that was very patriotic!”

Vaso, who came from Greece originally, then said, “In Greece, people would go out to the fields after paratroopers came down and look for their discarded parachutes. They then brought them home for making covers, clothes etc. You see, on one end, people donated their stockings for making parachutes, but on the other, people collected them as their own.”

That is very interesting to learn.

I did a little research about parachute silk online and found this:

http://www.neam.org/adelinegray.html

The following is directly quoted from the above website.

However, in December 1941, just after Pearl Harbor was attacked and America entered WWII, Adeline—famed as a jumper and skilled as a federally licensed parachute rigger—was hired by Pioneer Parachute Company in Manchester, Connecticut. The company, in conjunction with Cheney Mills, also of Manchester, was planning to make personnel parachute canopies using Cheney’s “nylon” fabric to replace silk material rapidly unavailable from Japanese-controlled Asian locations.

In earlier days, cotton fabric had widely been used to make hemispheric-shaped parachute canopies. It served well for years but had many shortcomings. In time, aeronautic laboratories developed improved cotton yarn that could be made into higher-strength, lower-weight parachute fabric. In the 1920s, filaments produced by silkworms were found to be superior in many respects to cotton yarn, and parachute fabric thereafter was made of stronger, more flexible, lighter-weight silk cloth. The majority of silk filament was produced in the Orient where silkworms were easily raised and could feed on the leaves of mulberry trees, ultimately making dense cocoons from which lengthy filaments could be drawn to create silk yarn convertible into fabric.

The loss of sources of high-volume silk filament production stimulated intensive searching for synthetic substitutes. Lab researchers at DuPont developed what they named “nylon” and introduced nylon hosiery at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. The rest is history.