Carl Zimmer

But Jerome Adams, who you mentioned, Surgeon General, he gets on TV and he's trying to wrap a cloth around his face and saying, look, you can make your own mask.

And it was not ideal, shall we say.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a fascinating story.

So there was a woman who was working for 3M.

She was consulting with them on just making new products.

And she really liked the technology they used for making these sort of gift ribbons, sort of blown polymers.

And she's like, wow, cool.

you should think about other stuff, like how about a bra?

And so they actually went forward with this sort of, you know, sprayed polymer fiber bra, which was being much nicer than the kind of medieval stuff that women had to put up with before then.

And then, you know, she's at the same time spending a lot of time in hospitals because a lot of her family was sick with various ailments.

And she was looking at these, you know, doctors and nurses who were wearing masks, which just weren't fitting them very well.

And she thought, wait a minute, like I could...

You could take a bra cup and just basically fit it on people's faces.

So she goes to 3M and is like, hey, what about this?

And they're like, hmm, interesting.

And at first it didn't seem actually like it worked well against viruses and other pathogens, but it was good on dust.

And so it started showing up in hardware stores in the 70s.

And then there were further experiments that basically figured it showed you could essentially kind of amazingly kind of give the material a little static charge.

And that was good enough that then if you put it on, it traps droplets that contain viruses and doesn't let them through.