Casimir Zeglen

rdf:langString Casimir Zeglen

rdf:langString Casimir Zeglen (Polish: Kazimierz Żegleń; 1869 near Tarnopol – before 1927) was a Polish priest who invented a silk bulletproof vest. At the age of 18 he entered the Resurrectionist Order in Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine). In 1890, he moved to the United States. In 1893, after the assassination of Carter Harrison Sr., the mayor of Chicago, he worked on an improved silk bulletproof vest. In 1897, he worked on it with Jan Szczepanik. It saved the life of Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain—his carriage was covered with Szczepanik's bulletproof armour when a bomb exploded near it. He was a Catholic priest of St. Stanislaus Kostka Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, then the largest Polish church in the country, with 40,000 in the parish. In his early twenties, he began experimenting with the cloth, using steel shavings, moss, and hair. In his research, he came upon the work of Dr. George E. Goodfellow, who had written about the bullet-resistive properties of silk. In his mid-thirties he discovered a way to weave the silk, to enable it to capture the bullet, while visiting weaving mills in Vienna, Austria and Aachen, Germany. A 1⁄8 in (3.175 mm) thick, four-ply bulletproof vest produced there was able to protect the wearer from the lower velocity pistol bullets of that era.