An iron heart and a steel breastplate – garrotters, dacoits,
and lascars, beware!
As the renaissance ended, so did the importance of personal
body armor, due to improving gun technology.
By the beginning of the
Victorian Era (1837-1901), very few military
personnel even wore a breastplate and metal helmet, other than combat engineers
(sappers and miners) and heavy cavalry (
cuirassiers).
Generally, the only metal vestige of armor was the officer’s
gorget and even that was fading fast from military panoply
The American Civil War and the
Franco-Prussian War opened a
new era of quick military movements where offense out weighed defense and
outmoded Napoleonic Era zone control tactics.
This is also the period that began a renewed interest in personal
protection that was light weight and portable.
By the Civil War American inventors came up with several
“
bullet proof” shirts or vests, none of which were very effective or
light.
Generally they were a scam put
upon gullible soldiers and those who did buy this armor were derided by the
others.
Original account of a Civil War bullet proof vest The image to the right is an advertisement from March 22 1862, page 192,
Issue of Harper's Weekly Magazine for a bullet proof vest. Buyer beware.
For the ultimate, real steampunk armor you have to go Down
Under to Australia and check out the
Ned Kelly Gang in the 1870s to 1880.
Their massive steel armor shirts and helmets
would indeed turn bullets, but they were terribly heavy and the loss of
mobility and poor peripheral vision in the viewing slits made these sets of armor
very limited indeed.
They were so heavy
the gang decided against leg armor as being way too cumbersome and so it was to
prove their undoing.
The full story is
on the Wikipedia link provided on their name.
More recently, Clint Eastwood emulated the Kelly gang in
A Fist Full of
Dollars (1964) in this rewrite of Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel,
Red Harvest and
Kurosawa’s later 1961 movie, Yojimo.
So much for
movie trivia.
The only successful set of body ballistic armor was made
much like ancient Chinese armor, formed from many layers of silk.
Ukrainian born
Casimir Zeglen was an
unlikely armor maker as he was a Catholic Priest living in Chicago; who made
the first commercially feasible bullet proof vest in 1897. Zeglen's vests were
made of silk fabric.
Silk, like spider
web material is incredibly strong for it size and has a high tensile strength,
which made it perfect for strong, tightly woven ballistic cloth.
Zeglen’s vest was offered for sale at the
astounding cost of $800 US dollars, well out of the range of all but the
wealthiest.
He went on to produce sheets
of the cloth, which could be made into a curtain to armor the passenger section
of a vehicle.
Of interest,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand did wear a bullet
proof vest on the day that his touring car received a bomb attack while in
Sarajevo.
He survived the bomb but was
shot in the neck later in the day; so began WWI.
His vest didn’t cover the throat.
Take note.
Different inventors played around with armor schemes, but
nobody was buying until the outbreak of WWI.
The first piece of medieval armor to be reintroduced was the steel
helmet. But they were not brought back
to stop bullets, which they didn’t, but the dangerous steel splinters of
shrapnel from the hellish artillery. The
Germans and the Allies both introduced helmets and toyed with facemasks to stop
shrapnel, but they were impractical and set aside. The only vestige of the facemask experiment is the “Frankenstein”
facemask mounting lugs seen on German and Austrian WWI helmets.
The U.S.
Model 8A experimental helmet is another example of
a throwback to medieval sources of a visored sallet.
It face is protected by a raiseable ballistic visor with eye
slits.
The prototypes were produced in
1918 by the Ford Motor Company for trials but only 1,300 were made.
The interior was a standard Brody style
suspension system.
Even more
sallet-
like were the earlier 1917 ridged
M2 and
M5A, experimental helmets, both without a visor.
Body armor was also reintroduced in limited quantities by belligerents and experiments were rampant and often ludicrous.
The Germans had a massive set of armor made for machine gunners, since
they didn’t move from their emplacements, but were constantly snipped at. A super heavy breastplate could and did turn
rifle bullets, but at the expense of movement.
Sniping got so bad that the Germany also had brow armor for the forehead
and was held in place with those vestigial helmet lugs. Finally, those lugs had a use.
Body armor was pretty much shelved after WWI, until the
Soviets produced light steel breastplates for their combat engineers, shock
troops and tank riders in WWII.
They
wouldn’t stop a rifle bullet and might stop a 9mm SMG or pistol bullet at
medium range … at least until the Germans improved their 9mm cartridges in 1943
and that was the end of that.
Our
modern ballistic vests use space age concoctions of
ceramics, graphite, and good old steel these days.
For now, body armor is back until new improvements in ballistics
returns the knightly vestiges back to the museum.
Here are a few images of contemporary Steampunk
outfits.
You can recycle an old
medieval costume breastplate or make one fresh with foam sheets or fashion one
out soft sheet aluminum or even go with the ever-popular chainmail look, with a
few enhancements.
I hope to see a few
sets of steampunk armor at CoastCon or Mobicon next year. They would be good for a
Call of Cthulhu RPG or LARP set in the 1880s!
CoastConFan
------------------UPDATE 23 OCT, 2012----------------
After I posted this blog entry, I turned up this excellent steampunk armored corset from
organicarmor.com and it was so different, I just had to add this piece to the blog. I suggest a visit to their site if you like interesting armor.
-------------------Update 17 Jan 2013---------------------------
I finally found an image I have seeking for the WWI US Army experimental helmet for snipers and machine gunners which completely covers the head in a very medieval sort of way. It might have been pretty good for shrapnel, but vision and hearing was highly impaired and it just wouldn't stop a rifle bullet.
Additional update: As of May 2014, I inserted more information into the body of the text and some links to the helmet.
 |
| U.S. Experimental Model 8A, 1918 |
Update June 2016 --------------------------------------
If this article was of interest to you, I highly recommend
you download a copy of
Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare, pub
1920 by
Bashford Dean PhD, who was the curator of armor at
the Met, printed by Yale
University Press.
The book has a nice
overview of the history of armor of earlier times leading up to WWI.
It shows a lot of very interesting
experimental helmets I hadn’t encountered before, especially some of the visors
that were attached to helmets.
The book
also discusses a range of body armor along with ballistic cloth, much of which
varies from medieval to the very modern in look.
Download for free from the Met at their website
Links of Interest
Here are a few additional links about Ned Kelly:
Christistie’s had a prop sale this past Thursday, 29
November 2012 that would make a prop collector pass out. 
