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Body Armor Basics

The History of Bulletproof Vests

The history of bulletproof vests as museums, the U.S. Army and NIJ record it: from metal armor and early silk vests to World War II steel flak vests, Korean War nylon and Kevlar soft armor.

ArmorList Editorial·September 29, 2024·6 min read

The history of bulletproof vests is a long one, and it explains a good deal about how modern armor is built and tested. This page sets out what museums, U.S. Army and Air Force history offices and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) record about it, and labels our own reading as ours.

One word first. NIJ's own article on police body armor says there is no such thing as bulletproof armor; ballistic-resistant armor protects against defined handgun and rifle threats. We use "bulletproof vest" here because it is the name people search for.

A story often told about this history concerns Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Lisa Traynor, Curator of Firearms at the Royal Armouries, wrote a book on it: according to the museum's listing, the Archduke owned a silk bulletproof vest made by the inventor Casimir Zeglen, but did not wear it on the day he was assassinated in 1914. Her book tests a reconstruction of that vest.

Early beginnings

For most of history, armor meant metal or hardened material: mail, plate, lamellar, made against blades and low-velocity projectiles. Firearms changed that. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes European armor declining through the seventeenth century: field armor was made heavier to be bulletproof against ever more accurate firearms, and with that weight and changes in tactics, most fighting men gave up all but the metal protecting vital parts such as the head, torso and hands.

Silk is the other early thread. The Royal Armouries describes Casimir Zeglen's vests as silk bullet-proof vests.

The industrial era

The best-documented case from the nineteenth century is metal, not fabric. State Library Victoria, which holds the armour, records that the Kelly gang began making suits of armour from plough parts in 1879, and that Ned Kelly wore his at the siege of Glenrowan on 28 June 1880. The library describes the gang's armour; it does not describe it as a model for later vests, and neither do we.

World Wars influence

World War I made helmets standard issue before it made vests standard. The Smithsonian records that when the United States entered the war in 1917 it used a variation of the British Brodie helmet, the M1917, which could protect against shrapnel but left the face and the sides of the skull exposed.

World War II brought the flak vest, made against shell fragments rather than bullets. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force cites a 1942 study that found relatively low-velocity projectiles, such as flak fragments and pieces of aircraft structure, caused 70 percent of bomber crew wounds. The Air Force Medical Service records that the Eighth Air Force surgeon delivered twelve body armor suits for combat testing in March 1943; the museum describes the armor as overlapping squares of 1 mm manganese steel sewn into fabric, and says body armor and helmets saved thousands of bomber crewmen from injury or death.

For how armor ratings work today, see Understanding Body Armor Ratings.

Postwar developments

Nylon came in the Korean War. The U.S. Army Special Operations Command History Office records that the M-1951 vest combined nylon with Doron, a laminated fiberglass, and that the Army's T-52-1 nylon vest, field tested with front-line troops in Korea in 1952, stopped 75.7 percent of all fragments and 24.4 percent of small-arms projectiles; the all-nylon M1952 vest that followed served into the Vietnam War.

Ceramic armor plates came later still. To learn how today's plates are made, see Materials Used in Armor Plates Explained.

The Kevlar revolution

Kevlar is a para-aramid fiber that Stephanie Kwolek invented at DuPont in 1965, according to the Science History Institute; the brand now belongs to Arclin.

NIJ says that in the early 1970s, in partnership with the U.S. Army, it began developing lightweight body armor woven from Kevlar. It field tested about 5,000 sets with 15 police departments in 1975 and 1976, recorded the first save on 23 December 1975, when a Seattle officer was shot during a robbery, and counted 17 other officers saved during the one-year test.

The standard came first: in 1972, NIJ's predecessor, the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, published the first performance standard for police body armor. NIJ developed its standard with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, followed by a voluntary testing program. In our reading, that pairing of a new fiber with a standard and a testing program created concealable soft armor as police know it. For more, read How Effective Is Kevlar in Body Armor?.

Later materials

Other fiber families followed. Dyneema is a trademark for an ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) fiber, and Gold Flex is a trademark for a unidirectional aramid composite, first sold by Honeywell and now listed by Solstice Advanced Materials; the names identify the makers' products, not a level of protection. How any vest performs is a property of the tested model, not of the fiber's name.

Modular carriers, which let a wearer add or remove plates and pouches, are now common on the military side; the Army describes its own current system as modular. Research continues on new materials, such as the nanoarchitected materials Army-funded researchers tested against microscopic projectiles in 2021. That is research, not armor anyone can buy.

For a look at how armor is made, visit How Is Bulletproof Clothing Manufactured?.

Cultural and legal impacts

In the United States, the main federal rule on who may own body armor, 18 U.S.C. § 931, bars anyone convicted of a felony that is a crime of violence from purchasing, owning or possessing it, and some states add their own rules. Outside the United States the rules differ by country. This is orientation, not legal advice; for more, see Can You Legally Wear Body Armor in Public?.

In our view, the history also teaches limits. Armor is tested against defined threats, and NIJ's own wording is that no armor is bulletproof.

Conclusion

The history of bulletproof vests, as the records tell it, runs from metal made heavier against firearms, through silk, steel flak vests and nylon, to aramid soft armor developed alongside a standard and a testing program. In our view, the lesson is that every era of armor answered the threat of its time.

To see what a specific model is recorded as tested to today, look it up on ArmorList: its product records show the standards a model is recorded as tested to and, for NIJ, its CPL status with the date the list was read.

Sources

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