A short look into strange, beautiful, and mostly failed historical attempts to farm spider silk.

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Early in winter of 2023, an orbweaver took up residence outside my apartment. I attempted to host it indoors through the seasonal change (which typically kills them) and observe it’s web-weaving. Instead of its neat spiral, the spider, disturbed by captivity, produced a chaotic tangle across the frame I had prepared.

The resulting structures reminded me of experiments by pharmacologist Peter Witt in the 1950s and 60s. Witt systematically studied how various drugs—from caffeine to LSD—affected spider web construction, producing a catalog of architectures (2 degrees of hearsay has it that he through the best parties). His work, later recreated by NASA scientists in 1995 (Noever, Cronise, and Ralwani 1995), revealed how different substances disrupted the spiders' ability to produce a regular geometry in curiously predictable - if bizarre - ways.

Spiders emerged as among the earliest land animals, probably around 400 million years ago, but definitely at least 380. Spiders with spinnerets, allowing for complex uses of silk, appeared over 250 million years ago, while the familiar spiral webs had evolved by the Jurassic period (191-136 million years ago). See Australian Museum.

The human pursuit of spider silk as a usable material is also older than one might expect, filled with ambition, frustration, partial successes, and forgotten experiments.

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Historical Attempts

In popular memory, efforts to produce spider silk might feel like a modern, biotech-driven dream. I first encountered the prospect in the Bay Area’s innovation ecosystem, when Bolt Threads promised “the future of high-performance fibers” using synthetic spider silk. In 2017, they released a line of limited-edition neckties woven from lab-grown silk proteins.

But spider silk’s tantalizing promise — incredible strength, elasticity, biocompatibility— is not a new revelation.

Firstly, note that much of the historical material in this piece draws from Eleanor Morgan’s Gossamer Days (or it's bibliography). That text is a wide-ranging exploration of human encounters with spider silk, including those of the author. However, I have also consulted original historical sources and recent research where noted. Pages 67 - 86 of this pdf, produced alongside the V&A's spider silk cape, summarizes a portion of the history very well. This is, by comparison, a light summary, though I've gone out of my way to find or translate (thanks Claude) original quotes and link to a few key primary sources. I'll proceed loosely chronologically, developing a timeline, though multiple distinct and non-linear threads development occurred simultaneously (namely optics use-cases vs textile use-cases), so it will seem a bit messy.

In 17th-century England, astronomer William Gascoigne observed a spider thread drift through the focal point of his telescope. Delighted by its thinness and strength, he began using spider silk to create precision crosshairs. By the 18th and 19th centuries, American inventor David Rittenhouse and Tuscan physiologist Felice Fontana independently adopted spider silk for leveling instruments and telescopes (Morgan 2016, 24). This thread of development - optics applications - seems either continuous or persistently re-emergent and ends up flourishing in the US during WWII.

A distinct thread is recorded starting December 5th, 1709, when Francois Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire presented on the utility of spider silk (original | Claude translation) to the Royal Academy of Sciences in the Hotel de Ville of Montpellier. He was a magistrate presiding over the court of accounts there and characterized his interest in naturalism as a simultaneously useful and pleasurable form of amusement. His presentation opened with comments on the importance of naturalism, noting that even Alexander the Great made time for the study alongside conquering the world. He proceeds to mention Aristotle, Pliny, and St Augustine in a similar light. Perhaps this was normal for the time, but I find the references oddly self-flattering. It reads like an excessive attempt to position his own pursuits--and those of the assembly--as of value to the crown. The presentation's findings on spider silk are similarly ambitious and optimistic, suggesting it a preferable approach to cultivation of silk worms, as well as suggesting medicinal properties to its consumption.

Along with this dissertation, Bon presented a pair of gloves and stockings, woven from spider silk he'd had collected (in the form of egg cocoons / sacs). Specifically, he ordered for spiders to be brought to him, then contained them in paper cones (while having them fed with flies) until they left an egg sac. He also offered to buy found egg sacs at the same price as silk. The process of turning these egg sacs into thread involved washing, soaking in saltpeter and gum arabic, boiling, drying, carding, and finally spinning. There's a story that Louis XIV at some point received the garments, which tore easily, and was unmoved.

The Royal Academy however, seems to have been impressed enough and rigorous enough to assign two individuals to follow up on and vet the discovery, one of whom was René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur--a prolifically productive naturalist who, among many other works, published his scientific response to Bon's initial findings (original | Claude translation) in November of the following year, 1710. If Bon was a well-resourced, ambitious, curious amateur, then Réaumur was all academic rigor. His task seems to have been to vet the feasibility of the use of spider's egg-case-silk for textiles expressly and only, though his methods included broad analysis of spiders and their silk. He tested different methods of feeding spiders and housing them together. He categorized spiders based on their different silk production methods, noting that spiders could make stronger or weaker silk for their own purposes. He also thought that the use of colorful spider silk cases from different species offer the theoretical benefit of naturally colored fabric (yellow, white, gray, sky-blue, or coffee-brown), though it was less lustrous than silkworm silk. Regarding strength, he found that of a thread of silk from the spider egg cases was 1/5th that of a silkworm cocoon, though thinner. He also found it more difficult and less efficient to extract sillk from the egg cases, which, within, contained the eggs themselves and other impurities. His ultimate conclusion was decisively pessimistic about the economic feasibility of spider silk production, finding that, depending on the spider species, it would take 55,296 spiders to produce a pound of silk (in contrast to 2,304 silkworm cocoons for the same weight of usable material) and not be worth the cost of housing and feeding them separately (a necessity on account of their affinity for eating one-another). He estimated the cost of spider silk would be 24 times that of silk-worm silk. He also however, hold at the end, perhaps as consolation to Bon, that a larger and sufficiently productive species of spider might yet be found - perhaps in the Americas, where reports indicate spiders are larger.

Reading Réaumur's report and process of experimentation is actually quite inspiring, but he never seems to push the fringes of his task: neither he nor Bon seems to seriously consider that there might be a better way to extract silk from the spiders than collecting their egg sacs / cocoons and Réaumur never investigates use cases beyond that of textile production. The investigation is wholly oriented around achieving an accurate comparison with the collection and transformation of silkworm cocoons into fabric.

Subsequently (late 1700s) Ramón María de Termeyer, re-commenced the study of spiders and the utility of their spider-silk. Termeyer was a Spaniard Jesuit who resided in South America until fleeing the Spanish Empire to Italy. Between 1810 and 1820, towards the end of his life, he published notes on his experiments with spiders and was critical of Réaumur's findings, demonstrating disappointment and frustration with the otherwise reliable "father of entomology."
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The obstacles which Réaumur considers strongest and, in his opinion, insuperable are: 1st. The difficulty of obtaining such a number of spiders as shall give a product sufficiently great to compensate for the labor and equal that which, with less inconvenience, may be obtained from the silk-worm. 2d. The extent of space which a colony of spiders requires, both from the length of their threads and the webs and from their ferocity which leads them, when they find themselves near and especially when incommoded, to devour each other, whereas for the silk-worms only so much space is required as is occupied by their bodies with a little additional space for the construction of their co-coons. 3d. The necessity of feeding spiders greedy and thirsting for the blood of living creatures , and the extreme difficulty of obtaining this; while silk - worms are easily fed with leaves and in some places are allowed to live upon the trees with no other care than that of gathering their co-coons. 4th. The small quantity of silk which is obtained from the spiders in comparison with the products of the worms. 5th. The quality of spiders' silk, far inferior in brilliancy and consistence to that of the worm. Wishing then to show how profitable the culture of spi-ders for the production of silk may become - more profitable even than the culture of silk worms - I have only to prove the invalidity of the objections here stated.

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In contrast to Réaumur, Termeyer found it easy to feed spiders with flies (which are readily attracted to and multiply from rotting meat). Termeyer was particularly critical of the values underlying Reaumur's calculations of economic viability - noting that silk-worm cocoons are less than 3/4 the weight they were taken to be. He also noted that Reaumur missed or dismissed spiders's ability to produce up to six egg cases a year (in contrast to the silkworm's 1). Termeyer noted that the species of spider he found in S. America produced much larger egg cases than those that Reaumer studied, while those in Italy, if not as large, are still more favorable than Reaumer's specimens. Finally, Termeyer argued that the thinness of spider silk was an asset which would yield finer material - not a downside - and that the lustrousness of the silk could be improved by using a silking technique (see the print below) instead of cocoon collection.

A remarkably similar invention was later independently developed in the US. During the American Civil War, naturalist-soldiers Burt Wilder and Sigourney Wales, encountering golden orb-weavers in the South Carolina lowlands, spun spider silk by hand onto feathers (Morgan 2016, p56). They proceeded to patent a spider silking machine in 1866 (see an article by Morgan here for more on that story), withoutany knowledge of Termeyer's prior work (though Wilder later tracked down, translated from Italian, and republished Termeyer's work, which is how I'm able to find his notes online today). In the preface to the republication, Wilder notes his surprise and fascination at finding an unknwown prior invention so similar to his own. He describes the original invention as...

...the representation of a process of obtaining silk from spiders, differing only in details from that employed by me at various times and with various modifications since the 19th of August, 1863 ... A process which, original with me at the time, proved also new not only to all scientific and practical men, to whom it was shown, but even to the experts at the Patent Office in Washington, so that a Patent was readily granted for the idea or process of obtaining silk directly from living spiders or other insects, by a reeling or circular motion applied to the insects themselves. This instrument is, of course, invalidated by the contents of this book, but it is not a little remarkable that an idea so novel , yet so simple, and one would think, so readily suggested by what we may see on any summer's day, should have been conceived and carried out a hundred years ago, and yet that there should be no reference to its nature, scarcely an allusion to its author, and, so far as I can ascertain, no knowledge of its having been published, up to the present time after I have been for three years engaged in carrying out the same idea.

Slightly later in the 19th century, Jesuit missionary Paul Camboué also developed a method for restraining and harvesting silk from spiders, setting up a short-lived spider farm in Antananarivo, Madagascar. His work produced a silk bed canopy that was displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition and subsequently lost to time (though samples from the production site do still exist at the quai Branly museum in Paris and the Musee des Confluences in Lyon - according to Morgan, p73). You can read Camboué's 1892 published research here (original | Claude translation) - he mentions the works of Bon, Reaumur, Termeyer, and Wilder (it's satisfying to see the distant inquiries concurrently recognized). This is how the term araneiculture—farming spiders for silk—briefly entered public imagination as a “new industry” when the display was covered in Le Magazin Pittoresque (and translated for the Literary Digest):

Various attempts have been made at different times to utilize the thread of the spider, but to Father Camboné, a French missionary to Madagascar, is due the credit of having first brought these attempts to a successful issue … The first experiments of Father Camboné were made in the simplest manner. The spiders were imprisoned in match-boxes, and by slightly compressing the abdomen he managed to extract and wind upon a little reel turned by hand a thread that sometimes attained a length of 500 yards. He was soon able to reach two conclusions: that the spiders gave out the longest threads soon after laying their eggs, and that in a month they can undergo two or three windings without inconvenience, producing about 2,000 yards of thread. These experiments were continued by M. Jolly, director of the professional school at Tananarivo, but it is to the ingenuity of M. Nogué, one of the sub-directors, that we owe the apparatus which permits the thread to be wound mechanically, and to be twisted and doubled in the quickest and most practical manner. This is done by means of a curious little machine not easy to describe, in which the spiders are imprisoned by the throat while undergoing the operation. Young Malagasy girls go daily to a park near the school to gather three or four hundred spiders, which they carry in osier baskets with wooden covers, to be divested of their webs. M. Nogué has at present a supply of 220,000 yards of thread. The average production of the workshops of Tananarivo is 40,000 yards a month. Generally, after having submitted to the reeling operation, the spiders are put back in the park for a couple of weeks. Each one of them, before it is exhausted, spins six or eight times what an ordinary silkworm can give, and at every operation furnishes a thread about 350 yards in length. Altho the silk of the halabé is fifty-two times finer than that of the bombyx, its strength is much superior. Its color when first spun is a beautiful gold, and it requires no carding or preparation of any sort before being woven. Will this be the silk of the future?

The intent seems similar to that of Bon - namely, to create a new commercial vehicle for the French, though this time in the colonies. I'm not sure what happened to this operation in the years after 1900, though the story and objective was recently picked up on in projects at the V&A (discussed below).

In the late 19th to early 20th century, British anthropologists encountered masks made of a spider silk base in Malakula Vanuatu. Morgan discusses how webs were collected onto a conical bamboo device and combined into hoods (see images and summary here). It’s striking to see spider silk seized upon as an available resource and valued in symbolic and ritual context (in contrast to the contemporary and seemingly ever-out-of-reach dream of producing the material at scale for industrial & commercial uses). I wish I knew when and how spider webs became part of the process of making the masks.

As alluded to at the outset of this history, the use of spider silk for optical instruments seems to have persisted with dedicated production even existing as a fledgling practice from the late 19th and into the 20th century. Morgan tells the story of Mary Pfeiffer, “the first recorded full-time silk collector” employed in New Jersey by the instrument maker Keuffel & Esser, starting in 1889, for over 50 years. Check out Morgan’s article for a summary and image - it seems that more spider farms blossomed in the US during WWII to supply the military with gunsights. A life magazine article entitled Science: Spiders Spin Thread for Gunsights, from August 30 1943, discusses, somewhat dramatically, the particular use of black widows:

Tougher than steel or platinum wire of the same diameter, it can outlast the writhings of victims many times the spider’s size. These same qualities make spider webbing the ideal material for the cross hairs that frame the objectives of telescopes, microscopes, surveyor’s transits, bomb sights, range finders and other precision instruments.

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In the past, for the normal requirements of precision optics, webbing has been extracted from the various garden species of spider. To meet the quantity demands of war production, however, the U. S. Army Quartermaster Corps has had to take on the big and venomous black widow.

The Quartermaster Corps rounds up its black widows at Fort Knox, Ky. where they are a notorious nuisance to soldiers engaged in field exercises, and dispatches them to its depot at Columbus, Ohio. There the spiders are stabled in glass coffee jars, fed two live flies per week and put on a strict routine of production. Every two days, each spider is lured out of her lair for de-webbing. The thread, spun by the spider as she hangs in the air or crawls on the floor, is wound on a spindle bent from a wire coat hanger. Production varies between 100 and 180 feet of usable thread per spider per week. None of the handlers has yet been bitten and the black widow has proved more manageable than smaller and flightier spiders. Under this regimen, the black widow’s life is shortened to four months, in which time she yields more footage than she would in her normal life span of a full year.

Today, some specialist optical repair shops—such as Tony Kay’s Optical Repairs in Selsey, England—continue to source spider silk for precision optics (Morgan 2016, 32).

Finally, in 2012, a project at the V&A revived Camboue's ambitions for the golden orbweavers of Madagascar and produced a fantastical embroidered golden spider silk cape and shawl, made from silk harvested by hand from over a million spiders. As both Reaumur and Termeyer had hoped, the result of the natural color is remarkably beautiful (see V&A). Reaumer's concerns about the number of spiders necessary to produce a useful volume of silk, and the related cost prohibitiveness would seem proven correct. This single product required the work of an entire facility in Madagascar - 'The Spidery'. However, this singular artifact was also only possible due to the silking mechanism which Termeyer, Wilder, and Camboue, all (independently) conceived of long after Reaumer had authoritatively dismantled the viability of a spider silk industry.

This 2014 DIY version of a spider silking mechanism by Jeffrey Doud lets the spider continuously ‘fall’ while spooling silk at a (seemingly automatically) adjusting rate (youtube clip). I imagine Bon would be pleased to see such an impressive DIY approach.

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What makes this hard?

Spider silk is globally familiar and biologically marvelous, yet humans never really domesticated spiders the way we did silkworms. Why? 

In short, spiders:

• are territorial and cannibalistic.
• react poorly to captivity.
• require individualized, labor-intensive handling to ‘silk’

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These realities perhaps explain why araneiculture never scaled and why knowledge of spider silk, despite recurring bursts of interest, has historically failed to accumulate. As Morgan notes, “It disappears and reappears when someone is looking for a material, and finds one close to hand” (Morgan 2016, 46). Perhaps with better tools for the recording and sharing of research accross time and geography, the V&A's cape would have been created sooner.

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Contemporary Dreams

A number of ambitious projects have tried to recreate spider silk at scale through bio-engineering approaches.

Since the early 2010s, Randy Lewis and researchers at the University of Wyoming & University of Utah have been engineered goats to produce spider silk proteins in their milk. Artist Sruli Recht created a machine-knit, hand sewn shirt from the products of these goats in 2012.

In 2014, Bolt Threads was founded to create microsilk from engineered yeast. They released a limited run of silk neckties in 2017.

Around 2018, AMSilk in Germany began producing spider-silk-like coatings for Adidas shoes and medical implants.

Kraig Biocraft Laboratories pursued genetically modified silkworms to produce spider silk proteins, with U.S. Army funding, into the early 2020s.

In 2023, Chinese researchers succeeded in engineering silkworms to produce silk with some of advantages of spider silk.

There are plenty of other labs and projects involving the study or application spider silk - I'll have to dig further into contemporary research efforts and use-cases another time. My impression is that, as of 2025, there are no major industrial breakthroughs, though laboratory-scale production continues. Moreover, while a number of labs are able to produce some of the component proteins in spider silk, the protein alignment function of the spinnerets is not well understood and has not yet been replicated or subverted. The dream remains alive, but elusive.

As Paul Romer and @CryptoNature pointed out (via Jason Crawford), if you described trees or cows in purely technological terms—solar-powered carbon capture machines that produce a versatile material, mobile chemical refineries that create milk and meat from grass—one would scarcely believe they could exist. Spiders and their silk are similarly wondrous when held with this perspective: thimble-sized machines that fish the air for flies transform them - at room temperature - into biocompatible structures stronger than steel and more elastic than nylon. It takes work to imagine something so fantastical.

The history of humans using spider silk seems somewhat tangled, broken, interrupted—much like the confused webs of Witt’s intoxicated spiders--but perhaps someday, the threads will connect. If you can’t wait for the real thing, consider investigating some of the additional resources below (factual or fictional).

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Resources

Morgan, Eleanor. 2016. Gossamer Days.

• Much of my writing above is a tour of highlights from this book. In writing it, Morgan worked with spiders and their silk through personal and academic projects for a decade. She is an alumnus of the Slade School of Fine Art. Gossamer Days gathers historical and current stories and accounts of interactions between humans and spiders, primarily around the use of their silk. The early chapters of the text discuss Morgan’s own interactions with spiders and their webs, followed by a discussion of spider biology and silk. Middle chapters focus on the history of spider silk as an alternately useful material and evasive dream in Europe and the US. This is followed by a discussion of spider silk clothing on the island of Malakula in the south pacific, then by an account of spider’s reactions to sounds, including human song. The concluding chapters discuss recent and ongoing research into spider silk. 

Noever, Cronise, and Ralwani. 1995. “Using Spider-Web Patterns to Detect Toxicity.” NASA Tech Briefs, April, 82. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20100033433.

• This is a brief overview of the research, from in a NASA Tech Briefs publication. The article describes the species Araneus Didematus (a house spider); intention to evaluate spiders for toxicity testing as a lower cost alternative to “higher animals”; and method of digitizing images of the web to count missed connections and other attributes. 

“Spider Origins - The Australian Museum.” n.d. The Australian Museum. Accessed February 24, 2023. https://australian.museum/learn/animals/spiders/spider-origins/.

• This brief article from the Australian Museum offers a useful overview of spiders' evolutionary timeline. 

Soth, Amelia. 2018. “The Tangled History of Weaving with Spider Silk - JSTOR Daily.” JSTOR Daily. November 15, 2018. https://daily.jstor.org/the-tangled-history-of-weaving-with-spider-silk/.

• This article provides a historical overview of two attempts made in France towards the production of spider silk, culminating in a reference to the golden orbweaver silk garment at the V&A. 

“A Rival of The Silkworm.” n.d. The Literary Digest, no. XXI No 23: 697. Accessed February 24, 2023. https://archive.org/details/literarydigest21newy/page/694/mode/2up?view=theater&q=bed.

• This article from The Literary Digest was translated from french. Amusingly, it concludes: “Will this be the silk of the future?” - a question echoed by news articles somewhat regularly today. The short article provides an overview of the ongoings of workshops at Tananarivo, producing 40,000 yards of silk a month. Each spider providing 350 yards at one time before resting for a couple of weeks. 
• The original article in french can be found here in Le Magazin Pittoresque coverage of the 1900 Paris Exposition

“Bolt Threads.” n.d. Wayback Machine. Accessed February 24, 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20141219044012/https://boltthreads.com/.

• Wayback Machine offers a timeline of automated snapshots of the internet. This captured myriad versions of the Bolt Threads website. In 2014, the company was early and had a typical barebones contact page, alluding to “spinning” high performance fibers. In 2017 the website prominently featured 50 limited edition spider silk ties. The company continues to post about other materials and collaborations with designers and brands, though spider silk no longer seems a primary goal.

This epic niche reddit thread on the fictional story of Empress Eugénie receiving spider silk gloves

Researches and Experiments Upon Silk from Spiders, and Upon Their Reproduction, Ramón María de Termeyer, 1866

Art Institute of Chicago video has a great discussion of the history

This Smithsonian article by Emily Matchar has a good overview of some ongoing research

Artificial Spider silk - University of Washington St Louis

Artificial Spider silk - Nature

Kraig Biocraft Laboratories

• Apparently funded with a gov contract
• The relevant PNAS paper

Wired on cow/goat spider proteins - this is also discussed starting on 137p of Gossamer Days, an allegedly partially successful replication of spider silk proteins in engineered goat milk, funded with defense and public market funds

Mechanical stress spider lifeline paper and Violin of spider silk (NPR)

Ted Talk on the Magnificence of Spider Silk - Cheryl Hayashi

The elaborate structure of spider silk

Bioscience Vol 46 No 9 - Unraveling the weave of spider silk

Life Magazine Aug 1943 - p47 “Black Widow” article - “Spiders spin thread for gunsight crosshairs”

New Yorker article (2017) by Nicola Twilley on spider silk history and current companies

Spider silk in crosshairs: American surveyor - 2005 article by Silvio Bedini

NY times on strength of spider silk relative to kevlar or steel

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Fictional / Speculative:

Andor season 2 features a spider silk fabric industry on the planet Ghorman.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015) - Intelligent, uplifted spiders on a terraformed planet evolve a complex society that uses silk for architecture, communication, and more — a literal civilization built from thread.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown (2014)- Spider silk is produced in industrial ‘webberies’ by genetically engineered ‘spiderworms’

“Spider Silk” by Andre Norton (1976) in Lore of The Witch Wold - a fantasy narrative of spider silk and giant spiders.

The Web Between the Worlds by Charles Sheffield (1979) - An engineer builds a space elevator using cables extruded from a device called the “Spider"

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