What is a Faraday Cage?

We’ve mentioned a couple times here at RTQ Apparel that our new WATT Baselayer kit creates a Faraday Cage around your body, to help protect you and provide health benefits during travel.

But what is a Faraday Cage?

Online sources define it as: “A Faraday Cage operates when an external electrical field causes the electric charges within the cage's conducting material to be distributed so that they cancel the field's effect in the cage's interior.” 

Essentially, that means that when outside forces try to penetrate the cage, the metal grid disperses and redistributes the energy before it can do so. And importantly, vice versa, too. If you took your phone inside a Faraday Cage, for example, you couldn’t make a call or get a signal from outside of the structure. So instead of allowing the electromagnetic field (EMF) waves to enter into your body, the silver yarn mesh grid in our fabric keeps that from happening. Instead, it detects the waves and disperses it across its own surface area instead of allowing it through the fabric.

Many people associate Faraday Cages with Nikola Tesla, who experimented with electricity and lightning quite a bit when he was creating his Tesla Coil in the late 1800’s. He’s portrayed in several movies experimenting with Faraday Cages where lightning strikes the cage but cannot affect a person standing inside its metal mesh surroundings. There is also a great scene in the movie with Johnny Depp, called Transcendence, where he creates a Faraday Cage for his wife out in her garden so she can’t receive a cell phone signal when she’s there and wants to truly disconnect.

Faraday Cage enclosures are typically made of either silver or copper wires, and our extremely intelligent materials partner, Taiana, developed a soft fabric solution that can now be made into clothes using similar technology. When I met with them on this fabric, they talked about all of the tests they ran with the spacing of the silver yarns to ensure a soft drape, silky hand and usable stretch. Getting this beautiful mix of wearability out of a highly technical fabric that provides health benefits is just amazing to me! I knew I needed to bring their research, paired with my travel uniform to the world. 

When we travel, especially when we're on the airplane, EMF radiation waves are surrounding us at all times. And the wonderful thing that this silver yarn grid does on the fabric is to help protect your internal organs and your body from those EMF waves getting past the cage that surrounds you when you wear our WATT Baselayer Kit. 

Stay tuned for next week’s blog and vlog post, where we're talking a little bit about why it's important to repel that EMF radiation and what that can do to help you during your travels.