The Faraday Cage Jacket 1

190 years ago, in front of a packed out theatre at the Royal Institution in Mayfair, Michael Faraday lined a large wooden box with metal foil, hit it with discharges from high voltage electrical machines… then calmly stepped inside. Sparks crackled across the outside of the enclosure. Blue light crawled over the metal skin. Faraday meanwhile stood there in silence. Like the final boss. While the energy simply flowed around him.

When an electromagnetic field hits a conductive enclosure, the free electrons inside it immediately start to flow, redistributing themselves across the surface until the field inside is cancelled out. It might have looked like Faraday had built his own supersized coffin – complete with all the necessary equipment to kill him – but it turned out he understood equations as well as he understood spectacle. 

By the time he stepped into his foil-lined cube, he’d already spent years dismantling older ideas of electricity. He knew that if he built the right shape from the right materials, electricity behaves like water flowing around a rock. It’s one of the simplest demonstrations of how matter tells fields what they are allowed to do. 

The impact of Faraday’s experiment quickly escaped the lecture hall – because the Faraday cage didn’t just deflect static charge, but whole regions of the radio frequency and microwave spectrum. The principle was applied in bunkers, test chambers and secure rooms. Then in spacecraft, data centres, radar installations and intelligence facilities, where even a stray spike of interference can crash systems or corrupt data. 

Today our Faraday Cage Jacket is a descendant not only of that wooden box, but everything that followed in its footsteps. It’s the same physics. Just shrunk. Softened. And wearable. We designed it from scratch, using the principles of clothing and electromagnetic infrastructure at the same time. And this is what transforms it from a pure physics experiment, to an object that looks like it’s just emerged from a craft in Dune. 

Large, faceted spaceship-style panels and snap-down flaps block electromagnetic waves across the 0.2–14GHz range. This includes all the unseen wiring of the digital age: WiFi at 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Bluetooth at around 2.4GHz. Mobile networks. As well as higher-frequency Ku-band satellite and radar systems. In lab testing the material reaches shielding effectiveness figures of up to 92 dB – which is the kind of level normally associated with secure infrastructure and electromagnetic test laboratories.

Most of us spend our lives today inside a semi-permanent yet completely invisible electromagnetic fog: radio waves from antennas. Microwaves from routers. Radar from aircraft. Signals bouncing between satellites, phones, vehicles and buildings. So the first Faraday Cage Jacket treats that electromagnetic energy the same way someone climbing Everest would treat cold weather – as something you can defend against, and insulate yourself from.

Every seam and every opening affects how energy moves across the jacket. And that’s why the jacket is built from large, faceted spaceship-style panels and snap-down flaps. Overlapping sections create layered shielding zones and add 10 – 20 dB more attenuation. Each overlap is another place for energy to be redirected – another chance to keep it moving around the body instead of through it.

The jacket’s eight pockets are designed the same way. Instead of flat bags stitched onto a shell, they’re three-dimensional, origami-like bellows pockets that form enclosed volumes that behave less like pockets and more like small rooms – put a device inside one of these pockets and it’s almost impossible to track, hack or even call. 

Long before the Curiosity Rover was sent to Mars to search for signs of life, its components had to be tested here on Earth. So NASA created electromagnetic shielding environments designed to block external radiation during testing – like someone sending a text next door, turning on a microwave, or interference from satellites and radar systems. The Faraday Cage Jacket works on the same principle and with the same technology. 

The jacket is built from Shieldex® Kiel + 30, a thermally bonded non-woven textile. Nearly half of its structure is copper. It wasn’t designed for clothes, but to line rooms full of sensitive electronics, where electromagnetic interference can shut down instruments, corrupt data, or damage hardware. 

Packed into a non-woven textile, the copper fibres create a continuous conductive network through the material. When electromagnetic energy meets it, electrons can move quickly and freely, spreading charge across the surface instead of allowing it to build inside. 

Copper is both electrically and thermally conductive, which is why it is used in wiring, shielding and electronics. It is also naturally antimicrobial. When bacteria come into contact with copper, positively charged ions disrupt their cell membranes and prevent them from functioning or reproducing. So while the Faraday Cage Jacket offers electromagnetic protection, its outer shell also stops bacteria on contact. 

As well as blocking radio waves and microwaves, the Faraday Cage Jacket’s copper-rich shell also changes how the body appears in infrared images. Copper has naturally low emissivity, which means it reflects infrared radiation rather than efficiently emitting it. And because the material is thermally conductive, heat spreads across the surface instead of forming the familiar hot spots produced by the human body. The result isn’t invisibility, but disruption: a thermal signature that is flatter, diffused, and harder to read.

Electromagnetic radiation is what allows energy and information to move through the universe. It is also the invisible infrastructure of the digital age. We are increasingly enmeshed in networks, signals, sensors and systems that didn’t exist a generation ago. And there is far more on the way. By wrapping shielding textile around the body and thinking about clothing the same way we think about architecture, the Faraday Cage Jacket creates a personal defence system against electromagnetic signal and noise.

At the low-frequency end, radio waves and microwaves can travel thousands of miles and underpin mobile networks, satellite communications, radar systems and broadcasting. At the high-energy end, ionising radiation interacts much more aggressively with matter, altering atoms and damaging living tissue, which is why we get sunburned, and why gamma rays from nuclear decay are so lethal. The first Faraday Cage Jacket is currently built to operate at the low-frequency end of this spectrum.