Scientists Invent Wall-Crawling Spider-Man Gloves

Those of you who are regular readers of our Spider-News segments and listeners to the Crawlspace Podcast are no doubt aware of a story in which there was research being done to replicate Spider-Man’s powers, including the ability to cling to and scale walls without the use of ropes. Some of you, I imagine, guffawed at what appeared to be futile attempts to mimic the Wall-Crawler, such as the United States Air Force buying from Utah State University what amounted to a $200,000 vacuum cleaner to wear on your back, or the years of research being conducted into making a fabric to replicate the skin and scales of geckos.

Well, for all you doubting Thomases out there who ridiculed and mocked the very idea that a person could ever scale a building like Peter Parker, I’ve got bad news for you.  Because thanks to one Elliot Hawkes and his team of mechanical engineers at Stanford University, SCIENCE! once again has the last laugh. Behold!

Of course, as you can see from watching the video, there are some noticeable drawbacks. For one thing, climbing up the side of building takes a considerable amount of time. Furthermore, as explained by Hawkes when interviewed by Popular Mechanics:

To work, the surface you’re climbing needs to be relatively smooth; like glass, varnished wood, polished stone, or metal,” Hawkes says, “but you can attach and detach with very little effort, and to make [the gloves] stick all you have to do is hang your weight.”

The other disadvantages are that the gloves will not work when wet, and the “adhesive material tends to accumulate dirt during use, reducing their effectiveness over time.” Nevertheless, according to Kellar Autumn, the bio-mechanical engineer at Oregon’s Lewis and Clark College which, if you remember from the previous story, had also been attempting to develop their own synthetic “Geckskin”:

“This is a really big deal. I’ve been dreaming about this for about 15 years, since we first discovered the mechanism that makes geckos stick to walls. And this is proof that we finally understood it well enough to make a person climb a building.”

Once again, it looks as if we’re moving one step closer to having the kinds of “super-powers” we only saw in the pages of our comic books. So long as it doesn’t rain while moving up an even surface, of course.

Source: Popular Mechanics