History of Electrospinning

Electrospinning has a long history, and has been, though not widely known outside of the materials science community, long been used as a method of producing polymer fibers and mats for a number of uses.

The process of electrospraying (the process of small droplets exiting the liquid rather than a thin stream) was first discovered in the late 16th century by William Gilbert.  He discovered this by placing an electrically charged piece of amber near a drop of water, which would cause droplets to shoot towards the amber when placed at the right distance and charged to the right amount.  This discovery sat for more than four hundred years before it was really used again: in 1902, two people separately patented the process of electrospinning (the more refined process of using electricity to draw out a fiber rather than droplets from the solution).

A decade later, John Zeleny began to study electrospinning from a mathematical perspective, attempting to understand the theoretical basis behind electrospinning and to model it.  This work was not completed until the 1960's, when Sir Geoffrey Taylor successfully modeled the fluid cone formed at the tip of the needle during the process of electrospinning - a cone now called the "Taylor Cone" due to his work in examining it.

Though electrospinning had been known for a long time, it was not really made practical for commercial purposes until the work of Anton Formhals.  In 1934 (and again in 1940), Formhals patented a refined method of spinning which solved a number of technical issues preventing it from gaining widespread use before then - namely the fact that the fibers could not dry fast enough to be collected in a solid form.  Formhals solved this by introducing a moving base for the fibers to land on, giving them enough time to dry in a process similar to a standard spinning drum.  This led, in 1939, to the first widespread use of electrospinning: a factory was established in the Soviet Union to produce BF (Battlefield Filter), a filter designed for use in gas masks.  By the 1960's, millions of square meters of BF were produced every year.