• Goldbeater's skin is used as the sensitive element in
hygrometers, since its
hygroscopic behavior includes contraction or expansion in response to atmospheric humidity. • During the
invention of the telephone,
Alexander Graham Bell used a drum of goldbeater's skin with an armature of magnetised iron attached to its middle as a sound receiver. • In 1754, Vatican priest
Antonio Piaggio used goldbeater's skin in one of the earliest attempts to unscroll and read the
Herculaneum papyri,
ancient Greek texts buried and hardened into carbonized lumps by the 79 AD eruption of
Mount Vesuvius. • The
North German Confederation printed 10- and 30-
groschen postage stamps on goldbeater's skin to prevent reuse of these high-value stamps. •
Joseph Thomas Clover invented an apparatus for measuring the inhalation of
chloroform in 1862; it included a large reservoir bag, lined with goldbeater's skin to make it airtight, into which a known volume of liquid chloroform was injected, while its contraction or expansion was monitored. • Due to its transparency, strength, and fairly uniform thickness, goldbeater's skin is used to repair holes and tears in manuscripts written on
vellum. • Large quantities of goldbeater's skin were used to make the gas bags of early balloons created by the
Corps of Royal Engineers at
Chatham, Kent, starting in 1881–82 and culminating in 1883 with
The Heron, of 10,000 cu ft capacity. The method of preparing and making gas-tight joins in the skins was known only to a family called Weinling, from the
Alsatia London area, who were employed by the Royal Engineers for many years. The British had a monopoly on the technique until around 1912, when the Germans adopted the material for the internal gas bags of the "
zeppelin"
rigid airships, exhausting the available supply: about 200,000 sheets were used for a typical
World War I zeppelin, while the
USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) needed 750,000 sheets. The sheets were joined together and folded into impermeable layers. == See also ==