54 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
BOTH PAGES: SAM OGDENIn a cluttered subterranean laboratory
at MIT, Jung Tae Lee is attempting
to make a battery as long and thin as
a fishing line. With a focused gaze, the
postgraduate researcher adjusts the
knobs on an imposing blue machine
that heats up and stretches out filament.
“Must stabilize before making active
fiber,” he mutters.
Benjamin Grena is more loquacious.
The grad student explains that the blue
machine, which stands nearly twice his height, is a draw
tower, a custom version of an industrial appliance used to
extrude glass rods into fiber-optic cable. Lee will make his
device by elongating, or drawing, a fat polymer cylinder
that has been embedded with electrodes and injected with
battery fluids. The trick is to keep the metals and liquids
aligned, as Lee heats and stretches the cylinder until its
diameter is ideally a mere 1/200th its original size — a
high-precision variation on pulling saltwater taffy. “And
then,” Grena says, “you’ll have a power source that can be
woven together with sensors and other functional fibers.”
These resulting electronic textiles could be worn as gar-
ments, implanted in a body or blanketed across a city. For
Yoel Fink — Grena and Lee’s MIT adviser and supervi-
sor, respectively, and the mastermind behind the high-tech
threads — the textiles represent nothing less than a turning
point in human civilization. “Fabrics have remained sort
of immutable since the Late Stone Age,” Fink says. “That’sbecause they’re made of fibers that are made of a single
material, and so long as you make fibers of a single mate-
rial, they’re not going to be highly functional.”
With a method for crafting fibers that integrate every-
thing from polymers to metals and fluids — and then
controlling the internal arrangement of these materials
— Fink envisions vast new possibilities for fabrics. And
given the ubiquity of textiles in our world, he believes the
fibers he’s working on will profoundly augment technol-
ogy as a whole.
Fink’s vision is attracting a following well beyond the
basements of MIT. In 2016, he founded an institute called
Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA),
a public-private consortium comprising more than two
dozen major research institutions, including Drexel
University in Philadelphia and Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh. The consortium also includes influential
technology companies such as Tesla and Corning, as well
as the U.S. Department of Defense.
As CEO, Fink commands a total budget of $317 million,
with which he intends to create a “distributed foundry” —
an institutional network with expansive expertise that can
efficiently push fiber innovations beyond zany lab experi-
ments and into consumer products. He has already built
a 20,000-square-foot prototyping facility, which began
operating in the Boston area last June.
Far from resisting Fink’s assault on millennia of spin-
ning and weaving, the traditional textile industry is a
committed ally. “I’ve been around textile people my whole
life, and I’ve never heard anybody talk
about putting electronics into a tex-
tile,” says Norman Chapman, presi-
dent of Inman Mills, a yarn-spinning
and fabric-weaving company in South
Carolina. Together with other indus-
try mainstays such as Milliken and
Warwick Mills, Inman has enthusias-
tically joined AFFOA.
In the frenzy of revolution, only
Fink’s students seem unflappable.
Fiber drawing cannot be hurried. As
his battery takes form, Lee keeps a
steady hand on the future.THE PERFECT MIRROR
Fink sits in his spacious MIT office,
cradling an army helmet wrapped
in camo-patterned fabric. “You see
these golden fibers?” he asks, point-
ing at some barely visible metallic
threads. “This was produced a few
years ago at Natick.”
He’s referring to the U.S. Army’s
Soldier Research, Development and
Engineering Center, an early collabo-
rator that helped him to demonstrate
that functional fibers could be woven
into standard gear. Ultimately, theYoel Fink, head of the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) consortium, examines
the two-story draw tower with colleague Chia-Chun Chung at the AFFOA offices in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The drawing process is key to shaping the functional fibers Fink has pioneered.