<P> Kazimierz Żegleń (Casimir Zeglen) - was a Polish engineer, born in 1869 near Tarnopol, (died not before 1927), who invented the first bulletproof vest . At the age of 18 he entered the Resurrectionist Order in Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine). In 1890, he moved to the United States . In 1893, after the assassination of Carter Harrison, Sr., the mayor of Chicago, he invented the first commercial bulletproof vest . In 1897, he improved it together with Jan Szczepanik who was the inventor of the first commercial bulletproof armour in 1901 . It saved the life of Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain - his carriage was covered with Szczepanik's bulletproof armour when a bomb exploded near it . </P> <P> He was a Catholic priest of St. Stanislaus Kostka Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, then the largest Polish church in the country, with 40,000 in the parish . In his early 20s he began experimenting with the cloth, using steel shavings, moss, hair . In his research, he came upon the work of Dr. George E. Goodfellow, who had written about the bullet resistive properties of silk . All early experiments produced an inflexible cloth which was more in the nature of a coat of chainmail . After the assassination of Mayor Carter Harrison, Zeglen renewed his efforts to find a bulletproof material and determined to use silk . In his mid 30s he discovered a way to weave the silk, to enable it to capture the bullet, while visiting weaving mills in Vienna, Austria, and Aachen, Germany . </P>

When was the first bullet proof vest invented