armour

/ahr"meuhr/, n. Chiefly Brit.

armor.

Usage. See -our.

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or body armour

Protective clothing that can shield the wearer from weapons and projectiles.

By extension, armour is also protective covering for animals, vehicles, and so on. Prehistoric warriors used leather hides and helmets. Chinese warriors used rhinoceros skin in the 11th century BC, and Greek infantry wore thick, multilayered metal-and-linen cuirasses (armour covering the body from neck to waist) in the 5th century BC. Shirts of chain mail were worn throughout the Roman Empire, and mail was the chief armour of western Europe until the 14th century. Ancient Greeks and Romans used armour made of rigid metal plates, which reappeared in Europe around the 13th century. Plate armour dominated European design until the 17th century, when firearms began to make it obsolete. It began to disappear in the 18th century, but the helmet reappeared in World War I and became standard equipment. Modern body armour (the bulletproof vest) covers the chest and sometimes the groin; it is a flexible garment reinforced with steel plates, fibreglass, boron carbide, or multiple layers of synthetic fabric such as Kevlar.

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▪ protective clothing

Introduction

also spelled  armor , also called  body armour  

      protective clothing with the ability to deflect or absorb arrows, spears, lances, swords, bullets, or other weapons that may be used against its wearer. Until recent times, armour was worn solely by combatants in warfare. However, the development of lighter protective materials and an increase in terrorism and the use of powerful personal weapons by criminals since the 1960s has led to the use of armour by police and possible targets of assassination.

Premodern armour

      Types of armour generally fall into one of three main categories: (1) armour made of leather, fabric, or mixed layers of both, sometimes reinforced by quilting or felt, (2) mail, made of interwoven rings of iron or steel, and (3) rigid armour made of metal, horn, wood, plastic, or some other similar tough and resistant material. The third category includes the plate armour that protected the knights of Europe in the Middle Ages. This armour was composed of large steel or iron plates that were linked by loosely closed rivets and by internal leathers to allow the wearer maximum freedom of movement.

      Presumably, the use of armour extends back beyond historical records, when primitive warriors protected themselves with leather hides and helmets (helmet). In the 11th century BC, Chinese warriors wore armour made of five to seven layers of rhinoceros skin, and ox hides were similarly used by the Mongols in the 13th century AD. Fabric armour too has a long history, with thick, multilayered linen cuirasses (cuirass) (armour covering the body from neck to waist) worn by the Greek heavy infantry of the 5th century BC and quilted linen coats worn in northern India until the 19th century.

      The advantage of chain mail is that it is quite flexible yet relatively impervious to slashing strokes (though a thrusting weapon can force the rings apart in spite of their riveted closure). In the form of a simple shirt, mail was worn throughout the Roman Empire and beyond most of its frontiers, and mail formed the main armour of western Europe until the 14th century. In Europe, strips of mail were also worn underneath plate armour to close any gaps left between the rigid plates. Mail shirts were worn in India and Persia until the 19th century, and the Japanese used mail to a limited extent from the 14th century, though the rings in Japanese mail were arranged in a variety of ways, producing a more open construction than that found in Europe. Mail sleeves, leg harnesses, and hoods have also been worn.

 Ancient Greek infantry soldiers wore plate armour consisting of a cuirass, long greaves (armour for the leg below the knee), and a deep helmet—all of bronze. The Roman legionary wore a cylindrical cuirass made of four to seven horizontal hoops of steel, with openings at the front and back, where they were laced together. The cuirass was buckled to a throat piece that was in turn flanked by several vertical hoops protecting each shoulder.

      Apart from helmets, armour made of large plates was probably unknown in western Europe during the Middle Ages, and mail was the main defense of the body and limbs during the 12th and 13th centuries. Mail hoods covered the head and neck, and mail leggings covered the legs. Mail, however, did not possess the rigid glancing surface of plate armour, and, as soon as the latter could be made responsive to the movements of the body by ingenious construction, it replaced mail. Thus, plate armour of steel superseded mail during the 14th century, at first by local additions to knees, elbows, and shins, until eventually the complete covering of articulated plate was evolved. A complete suit of German armour from about 1510 shows a metal suit with flexible joints covering its wearer literally from head to toe, with only a slit for the eyes and small holes for breathing in a helmet of forged metal. The armour suits of royalty and aristocrats were often elaborately gilded, etched, and embossed with fine decoration.

      In the 16th and 17th centuries improvements in hand firearms forced armourers to increase the thickness and, therefore, the weight of their products, until finally plate armour was largely abandoned in favour of increased mobility. Armour cuirasses and helmets were still used in the 17th century, but plate armour disappeared completely in the 18th century, because it was by then useless against most firearms and only hampered the soldier's mobility. One basic piece of armour, however, the helmet, reappeared on the battlefield during World War I and became a standard piece of equipment for most soldiers.

Modern armour

      The extensive use of high-explosive artillery shells during World War I resulted in a high proportion of wounds caused by shell and grenade fragments. Steel helmets were designed and, after the first year of the war, were worn by all troops. Torso armour of both fibre and steel was issued to troops for special purposes but was generally too heavy for full acceptance.

      During World War II casualties of shell fragments rose to 80 percent, and, with 70 percent of all wounds affecting the torso, it became highly desirable to produce a suitable body armour. Armour for bomber crews and ground troops was developed of steel, aluminum, and resin-bonded fibreglass plates, as well as of heavy nylon cloth. The body armour developed for fliers—quickly dubbed flak suits after the German term for antiaircraft artillery—and the antifragment vests used by soldiers and Marines during World War II and in the Korean War contained plates made of either manganese steel or a bonded fibreglass called Doron. By 1951 both the U.S. Army and Navy were using semiflexible vests made of basket-weave nylon and plates. These vests gave adequate protection against fragments from bursting mortar, artillery, or antiaircraft shells but would not stop an armour-piercing bullet, although titanium plates introduced in 1967 gave improved protection.

      New hard compounds appeared, such as the ceramic boron carbide; steel-composite vests were used with great effect by helicopter crews subject to heavy ground fire during the Vietnam War. The field of body armour was revolutionized, however, by the discovery that numerous layers of nylon fabric could dissipate the energy of a bullet. Particularly revolutionary was the DuPont Company's invention in 1965 of Kevlar, which is a nylonlike polymer widely used for reinforcing armoured vehicles, in helmets, and in body armour.

      The function of steel or hard plastic armour is to be impervious to a bullet. The function of ceramic armour is to slow the bullet abruptly by the hardness of the ceramic and to dissipate the bullet's energy as it destroys the armour at the point of impact. A ceramic bulletproof vest must be constructed of tiles, which have to be replaced once they have stopped a bullet.

      In contrast, a textile bulletproof vest is fashioned of 16 to 24 layers of nylon cloth of a heavy weave, with the layers stitched together like a quilt. Any ordinary bullet fired from a pistol or submachine gun that strikes such a garment is immediately flattened as it hits the outermost layers, and the now mushroom-shaped slug dissipates its energy as it presses against the remaining thicknesses of the vest, unable to penetrate its overlapping layers of coarse mesh. The wearer of such a vest is usually bruised by the impact of a bullet but typically suffers no more serious consequence. Vests of 16 layers will stop regular bullets from a handgun or submachine gun; those of 24 layers will stop the more powerful magnum bullets from the same weapons. Though bulky compared with a single layer of any fabric, multilayer nylon material can be readily fashioned into a vest or full torso protector that can be worn undetected under regular clothing.

      Apart from the obvious military applications of the fabric bulletproof vest, the rise of terrorism from about 1960 led to the increased use of body armour by police and antiterrorist troops—as well as by terrorists and other armed criminals themselves.

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