Casimir Zeglen

Who is Casimir Zeglen?

Kazimierz Żegleń, born in 1869 near Tarnopol, invented the first bulletproof vest. At the age of 18 he entered the Resurrectionist Order in Lwow. In 1890, he moved to the United States. In 1893, after the assassination of Carter Harrison, Sr., the mayor of Chicago, he invented the first commercial bulletproof vest. In 1897, he improved it together with Jan Szczepanik who was the inventor of the first commercial bulletproof armour in 1901. It saved the life Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain - his carriage was covered with Szczepanik's bulletproof armour when a bomb exploded near it.

He was a Catholic priest of St. Stanislaus Kostka Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, then the largest Polish church in the country, with 40,000 in the parish. In his early 20s he began experimenting with the cloth, using steel shavings, moss, hair. In his research, he came upon the work of Dr. George E. Goodfellow, who had written about the bullet resistive properties of silk. All early experiments produced an inflexible cloth which was more in the nature of a coat of chainmail.