Spider silk

07.14.09

“They stole our idea!!!” I whispered vehemently to Amy, who was sitting next to me in the auditorium that morning. A second later, the two of us burst into giggles, seeing as Nokia’s concept had been developed a year earlier that we had even met each other.

In the first days of the Art|Sci Nanolab program, we had been sharing several random ideas for possible final presentation topics. The first among many discussed was nearly chosen, until I mentioned my longtime aspirations to be able to record dreams. That caught the group’s creative desires, so we completely dropped the first idea that had been born during a random conversation on the “Harry Potter” stairs of the C(n)SI building.

However, after watching that Nokia advertisement, I realized how lucky we were to have dropped that original idea, as it would’ve seemed to be taken straight from Nokia’s conceptual invention!

Okay, now to clarify our original ideas. I always heard that a strand of spider silk is stronger than steel of the same size. Thus, I thought that using nanoscience, one could manufacture spider silk in great quantities, using it as a resource on its own. Furthermore, spider silk is extremely durable and ductile, meaning possible condensing of the creation.

So our original idea was to create portable houses out of spider silk material, and this idea is used quite similarly in the wearable Nokia phone. As a whole, the nanoscience, spider silk structure, and pliant material are all ideas we thought we coined, but ended up previously in existence.

It’s hard to be original these days.