NOVA

(horses whinnying)

NARRATOR

Revered as heroes, knights in shining armor were elites, covered in skins of gold.

TOBIAS CAPWELL

It's meant to be awe-inspiring. It's meant to blow your mind.

NARRATOR

Their armor embodied a revolution in metal making.

ALAN WILLIAMS

These armors were very much Rolls Royces of the day.

NARRATOR

But how were they made? The secrets behind their construction have been lost.

RIC FURRER

When you start asking the questions of how did they actually do this, there aren't many easy answers.

NARRATOR

Now, a team of craftsmen will try to solve the mystery and make an armor from scratch.

JEFF WASSON

I don't think that anybody has really tried to do this using old techniques for hundreds of years. So it's a lost art.

NARRATOR

But could these armors stand up to a powerful new weapon? their work will be put to the ultimate test.

TAVARES

It's a little scary, all this... months of work. (gunshot)

NARRATOR

What happened to the legendary knight as the battlefield changed? (gunfire) "Secrets of the Shining Knight" revealed, right now on "NOVA." Major funding for "NOVA" is provided by the following. fection itself, the armor worn by medieval knights was both beautiful and functional. It represented a major technological innovation. But amidst the masterpieces, there are marks left by another innovation. What could have caused these dents? It's not widely known, but for more than 200 years, knights in shining armor and guns coexisted on the battlefield. Knights were some of the first people to take up firearms. They weren't the backward, out-of-touch people that we often imagine-- no way. But could they keep up in this medieval arms race? (gunshot) Did guns usher in the end of the knight in shining armor? The image of the knight goes back to the legend of King Arthur and his round table. Arthur's fabled reign in the sixth century inspired a medieval tradition of noble warriors living by the codes of chivalry and romantic gestures of courtly love. These customs flourished across Europe. Knights were elite warriors fighting to protect the lands of feudal lords and kings and expand the power of the church. (children shouting) Long before guns, knights battled on horseback and on foot. They fought with swords and lances, which they trained to use in tournaments like this modern-day competition in England. (competition announcer shouting unintelligibly) But in a medieval world of stone and mud, it was armor that elevated them to near godlike status.

CAPWELL

Put yourself in the position of an ordinary person. To see an armored knight, it would have been like seeing the sun manifest in human form. They are the wielders of divine power. "Look at me. I'm radiant." (horses whinnying, swords clashing)

NARRATOR

But behind this exalted image, a great transformation was brewing. Feudal fiefdoms were giving way to the rise of nation states like England, France, and Spain, with large standing armies.

PAMELA SMITH

We have all kinds of romantic notions about knights, but this period is one of real change. There was great competition, great military needs, that were driving very new technologies of war. (gunshot)

NARRATOR

To keep up in this arms race, armorers created superhero suits that represented a revolution in metal making. And a select few were crafted with secret techniques that made them stronger than others, possibly even bulletproof.

ALAN WILLIAMS

These armors were twice or three times as hard and strong as the armor which the ordinary foot soldier would have to wear. You would be safe on almost any battlefield.

NARRATOR

But the knowledge behind their construction has been lost.

CAPWELL

There are no surviving period texts on how to make and how to harden and temper armor.

KEITH DOWEN

We don't know much about the details for the construction of armor anywhere. Armorers simply didn't write down their craft. This was something that was learned over many years of apprenticeship. What armorers didn't want was for their secrets to get out.

NARRATOR

Now, a modern day armorer is trying to solve the mystery. working from his backyard forge in suburban Long Island, Jeff Wasson is a leading craftsman of medieval armor.

JEFF WASSON

I don't think that anybody has really tried to do this using old techniques for hundreds of years. So it's a lost art.

NARRATOR

An art perfected during a key moment in scientific history.

SMITH

This is the period of the scientific revolution, from about 1400 to about 1700. Craftspeople really were the scientists of their day. They were the experts in the behavior of natural materials, in synthesizing new materials out of the materials of nature. And they do enormous amounts of experimentation in order to test out these materials, and reproduce those things again and again, as we think of scientific replication.

NARRATOR

Because these craftsmen were so secretive, a basic question has long mystified historians-- how did they make plate armor?

CAPWELL

Because it's difficult, mysterious and dangerous, nobody's done it. You have to get the craftsmen talking to the scientists, talking to the historians. There's a lot of pieces that need to be in place.

NARRATOR

At the Art Institute of Chicago, they're trying to bring these pieces together. Curator Jonathan Tavares has asked armor maker Jeff Wasson to join a team of craftsmen trying to build medieval armor from scratch.

TAVARES

For me, as that young boy obsessed with arms and armor, I was always fascinated-- how were these things made? I have to see it for myself, and I know I'm not the only one who wants to see this.

NARRATOR

Jeff will try to reproduce one of the best pieces in the institute's collection-- this 16th century armor. If all goes well, he'll test what he's made to see how it stands up to the newest weapons of the day-- guns. This armor was created in a royal workshop founded by the infamous king of England, Henry VIII. Henry idealized knights, and he cloaked himself in the age old-legend of King Arthur and his Round Table.

DOWEN

Henry VIII had his own image painted onto the table at Winchester in place of that of King Arthur, i.e. announcing himself as the new King Arthur.

NARRATOR

And he turned to armor to bring him even greater status.

CAPWELL

But Henry, when he came to the throne, didn't have an armor workshop, and he needed something that would express his own personal taste and style as a knight, as a warrior, and as a king.

NARRATOR

England's biggest rivals in the 16th century were France and Spain. To keep up with his competition, Henry founded the Royal Greenwich Workshop in 1515. Carried forward by his successor Queen Elizabeth I, it produced only a few hundred armors in its century of existence, but they were some of the best ever made.

WILLIAMS

These armors were very much Rolls Royces of the day.

RIC FURRER

It's like an Armani suit that protects you. They had this give and take between what was stylish, what was protective, and what was ultimately practical.

NARRATOR

Henry built the workshop alongside his palace at Greenwich. But today it's gone without a trace.

CAPWELL

There's no plaque. There's no foundations of buildings. There is nothing that would give you any clue of what went on there.

NARRATOR

The techniques for producing plate armor had been lost before. The Greeks and Romans knew how make it, but their knowledge largely disappeared with the fall of Rome in the fifth century. This was the beginning of the Dark Ages, when Europe splintered into feudal realms, and much technology was lost.

SMITH

To produce complex kinds of material things, you have to have the infrastructure. Western Europe at this time was really a backwater in terms of technology.

NARRATOR

For most of their existence, instead of plate armor, European knights wore a type of protection called mail that was made of countless intersecting metal rings. But it had its vulnerabilities. Mail has been around since antiquity, thousands of years. And it's been perfectly adequate. And in many ways it was the ultimate protection for this-- slashing, cutting attacks. Slashing, cutting attacks do nothing if you've got the mail and the padding. So you change the direction of attack from that wide surface area to a tiny, tiny surface area like this. And the metal's just as effective. But you just bring it down two millimeters, and there is no metal. While its mesh structure also didn't stop the impact of bludgeoning blows, mail did provide some protection against projectiles. But a technological advance in the 1300s helped change everything. With the steel crossbow, the strength of a man's arm no longer limited how far and fast an arrow could fly, thanks to a mechanical crank.

DEANE

What we have here is a cranequin. Very simple-- bring it up, slide it down. Then you get your jaws, get a little bit of tension, and you start cranking it up. Any idiot could use it as long as they knew which way to point.

NARRATOR

These crossbows were up to seven times more powerful than hand-drawn weapons.

SMITH

People were getting killed by new kinds of technology. And armor made with much more continuous metal than chain mail was really necessary to win wars.

CAPWELL

All the way through the 13th, 14th centuries, the story of armor development is the story of, how do we cover large parts of the human body with metal plates when we can only smelt pieces of iron that are about as big as a softball?

NARRATOR

How to make large pieces of steel is a puzzle the armor-making team will need to solve again today. Arnhill, get your body over here! David, we need you. Let's walk it all the way around here. In northern Wisconsin, master metalsmith Ric Furrer is trying to rediscover this lost art. He and his team are tasked with forging large enough pieces of steel to make into armor.

RIC FURRER

When you start looking at the technology behind armor as a whole and start asking the questions of how did they actually do this, there aren't many easy answers. Nobody has started with dirt, you know, with raw ore, and followed it all the way through to actually produce a suit of armor. We're going to do every step that was done to this suit of armor, and it hasn't been done since they were practical pieces of defense.

NARRATOR

Ric gets some clues for how to proceed from the earliest scientific metal-making book, published in 1556.

SMITH

This book, "De Re Metallica," which means "about metals," was really the first of its kind anywhere. What it tried to do was lay out a general theory for how metals form underneath the ground, and then what human beings do when they draw those metals out of the earth. They smelt them and then they produce complex material objects.

NARRATOR

These early images provide some guidance, but the rest is mostly trial and error.

FURRER

I've made a lot of metal before by a lot of different techniques. but to make big plate like this is difficult.

NARRATOR

Ric starts by building a six-foot-tall furnace called a bloomery. Maestro, I want you to put it in the top, you tall bastard. People have been extracting metal from rock for thousands of years. Early craftsmen learned that heating iron ore with charcoal resulted in a hard metal called steel.

FURRER

Steel is an alloy, a combination of essentially iron with a little pinch of carbon added. So we're adding charcoal. That's both our heat source and our carbon source. And then we've got iron ore. It's this crushed rock that's got iron in it. So we put it in that layered stack, and that should leave behind a nice bloom for us to forge into the plate for the armor.

NARRATOR

They pump air to feed the fire. It has to reach 2,500 degrees and run for 12 hours for the layers of iron ore and charcoal to transform into steel. For the craftsmen of the time, the science was a mystery. But this is how it works. In pure iron, the atoms are packed together like sheets of marbles, so when pushed or pulled, they easily slide past each other, yielding a soft metal. But as Ric's iron ore gets very hot, the carbon from the charcoal becomes trapped between the iron atoms, making the atomic structure more rigid and changing the soft iron into harder steel. In medieval times, some of the best iron that armorers could get came from a region in Austria called Styria, which produced 15 percent of Europe's ore.

FURRER

The raw materials in Styria were all right there. They had wonderful ore, and they also had a lot of forests. So you could make charcoal. You had water in fast moving streams, so you could tap into that energy. You can see these old technologies still functioning as living history museums.

NARRATOR

Water wheels replaced human-powered bellows. And with this virtually unlimited supply of air, furnaces could burn hotter and produce larger pieces of steel.

FURRER

They were able to produce on a vast scale. We're playing catch-up.

NARRATOR

Ric's fire has burned for hours, and he's ready to remove the raw steel, called a "bloom".

FURRER

And at the bottom you have a bloom. It looks like a sea sponge. There's a piece there. You have to start with a tremendous amount of bloomery material just to get the major pieces of plate, let alone all the small pieces. Ready with the tongs? Ready with the tongs! Lock onto that! Yep. Let me help you, Michael. Let me come in from here. There it is! Carry it over!

NARRATOR

The bloom still has waste material, known as slag, that could weaken the plate.

FURRER

You guys ready? Gentle nudging. Gentle, gentle.

NARRATOR

As they pound the metal, they drive off impurities that appear as sparks.

FURRER

The breastplate weighs about 13 pounds. That sounded nice and solid. Not a lot of slag. To get 13 pounds of metal you need to start with 30 pounds of bloom. And as you work the bloom down, you lose material. Out of the run we've gotten today, we might have enough for the breastplate. But we'll sort through all of this this after it cools to try to scavenge every little bit that we made and do the best we can with what we've got. Nice. So as far as experimental archeology goes, it's a success. But we're not quite at the efficiency level of the guys in the 1500s.

NARRATOR

In Styria, water didn't only power the bellows, it drove massive hammers that flattened the bloom into plates.

FURRER

How do you outfit a thousand common men or even semi-professional soldiers in protective gear? And the answer is the start of mass production.

NARRATOR

Styria was a major center for the mass production of steel. At its peak, this armory was the largest of its kind in the world. It held hundreds of thousands of armors and weapons.

BETTINA HABSBURG-LOTHRINGEN

Most of the armor we have here were produced for foot soldiers. Armor was produced in small, medium and large, so these were the three possibilities you had. There were small workshops spread all over the country where many people worked.

NARRATOR

This mass-produced armor worn by common soldiers was a step up from mail. But by the time armorers figured out how to make these suits in the early 1400s... (gunshot, horse neighs) A new, more powerful weapon had appeared. This is one of the earliest types of handgonnes, and all it is is essentially a barrel that's been mounted to a wooden shaft. A handheld cannon, that's what it is. Developed in China, these are the first true firearms. They have no trigger. Instead, a hot poker ignites the gunpowder, which propels a metal ball or other projectile. (bangs) Didn't score points, but it hit the target. Better luck next time! Though these early guns were inaccurate, their power was demonstrated in the early 1400s, when pre-Protestant rebels in Eastern Europe called Hussites used them to fight against the Catholic Church. (gunshot)

BREIDING

The earliest demonstratable power of firearms is the Hussite battle carts. They would circle into formation, and then on each cart, you had about two hand-gunners, six crossbowmen, and some with other weapons to defend the hand-gunners while they were reloading. And they defeated chivalric armies of the time in heavy armor.

NARRATOR

Guns soon swept across Europe.

BREIDING

Some of the German cities in the early 15th century were probably able to put about 2,000 men in the field with some of these firearms.

NARRATOR

Weapons became more lethal as they evolved into trigger-fired muskets. These guns were widely carried in the 16th century, when the Greenwich workshop was at its peak.

BREIDING

This is basically what people wearing armor were afraid of. The barrel is a lot longer, and that allows for the full force of the combustion to go behind the musket ball and be propelled out. It gives you better velocity, better control, and better range. So I'm tightening the clamp on it, which is called a serpentine, like a serpent or a dragon that's going to breathe fire, and ignite it. (blowing) Going to try it.

NARRATOR

The musket ball travels more than a thousand feet a second and can hit a target a hundred yards away. (bangs) (chuckles): Whew, it's a bit of a punch. So how did armor worn by the common foot soldier stand up against the musket? (gunshot) In Maryland, Jonathan has asked one of the world's leading ballistics testing companies to answer that question. They're using a breastplate made of modern steel 1/16 of an inch thick. It's the same thickness, but made of better-quality metal than what an average foot soldier would have worn at the time. (blowing) Okay, clear the range. Ready?

WESLEY MASON

Yes.

NARRATOR

To protect against ricochets, they'll trigger the weapon from another room. (gunshot) Filmed at 20,000 frames a second, the results are clear.

TAVARES

God. (exclaims) (chuckles): Oh, my God.

NARRATOR

A foot soldier would never survive such a shot from a musket. You can even see, like, powder burn on there. Ouch! But there was a superior class of armor available to the most elite warriors. At the Art Institute of Chicago, armorer Jeff Wasson examines pieces of armor suspected to belong to an English lord named Compton, from Queen Elizabeth I's court. He and Jonathan look for it in a 1587 Greenwich album-- a kind of sales catalog demonstrating different styles for prospective patrons.

WASSON

By looking at the album, you can see how they were worn, what kinds of decoration that they had. So they help complete a picture of what these armors looked like when they were worn in their time. Lord Buckhurst, and also Lord Compton. This is the one we're making.

NARRATOR

When Lord Compton ordered this armor around 1588, England was facing a great threat. The Spanish had built the famous Armada, and the English were fearing that a land invasion would follow.

MAN

One, two, three, up!

NARRATOR

This piece at the Wallace Collection in London is one of only two complete armors in the world made in the same style as Compton's.

CAPWELL

What the designer is trying to do is give his patron options. It's an interchangeable armor system depending on what the fighting context is expected to be.

NARRATOR

The men wearing these armors needed them for hand-to-hand combat, as well as mounted warfare. Because the Spanish were well armed with muskets, a key piece was a second breastplate, called a placard, intended to make a knight bulletproof.

TAVARES

The question I get time and again, "Weren't they smaller then?" There is a thought that men were a few inches shorter, but size five-eight, five-nine, was very common in that time. So it's nine-and-a-half inches. And we have, we have ten inches here. I'm five-eight. It just so happens that the armor fits me.

NARRATOR

The breastplate's rounded shape had its own function. Known as a peasecod, it was mirrored in the clothing of the day. It would come down into the waist. And it's very V-shaped. It forms sort of a ridgeline down the front of the body. Armorers knew a person wearing flat armor bore the full force of a blow, but a rounded peasecod belly or helmet offered more protection because it helped deflect a strike. But providing protection without adding too much weight was another challenge. How did they make the armor thick enough to resist bullets but light enough to wear?

WASSON

The downside of having a thicker breastplate or thicker armor all around is, it starts to become really ungainly to wear. So cavalry, they start discarding it. They would rather be lighter and more maneuverable.

NARRATOR

The trick was to taper the metal.

WASSON

Measuring with the calipers, you can really see that. Pretty much this area right in here is the thickest area of the armor. As it gets towards the edges, it starts to thin out. When we go right on the edge, it's about a sixteenth of an inch. I'm going to go in a bit. If you want to kill somebody, you'd probably want to go right in the center. 16... It's four times as thick right here. I'm very certain that it was made to deflect gunfire. This is a little model. We have the thickness variations that we need in order to keep it thick in the center and then thin out at the edges... Right.

NARRATOR

To precisely craft the raw metal into bulletproof plates, Jeff brings his measurements to Ric in Wisconsin. Starting with a total of 30 pounds of bloom, Ric begins to flatten each piece into a slab. With every hit, impurities fly off.

FURRER

There's still slag, there's waste material, there's non-metal. As much as we can distribute it, we try to, but some of it still remains.

NARRATOR

If everything goes right, it will take about 1,000 hours to make enough plate for the entire armor. But transforming these pieces into large bulletproof plate will be a challenge. Ric's strategy is to weld the layers of metal together, alternating the directions of the grain, to give the whole plate added strength.

FURRER

Just like wood has a growth direction, a grain, so does this bloomery material. So by forging this material out and laying one front to back and one side to side, you get a stronger product in the end.

NARRATOR

These layers are visible in some knightly armors of the time that have begun to pull apart after centuries. It's not just one thick piece of steel. It's actually layers that have been hammer-welded together. So this is laminated defense. Hit! Light, light! Then he repeatedly folds each piece to mix the steel as evenly as possible.

WASSON

I like to think of it as, like, if you're mixing bread, when you first mix it, parts of it are crumbly and other parts are too wet. And so, basically, we've got to mix this metal and make sure that it gets consistent enough that it can be rolled out into a thin sheet or plate.

NARRATOR

Ric can only pound the metal when it's hot, so he reheats it over and over. But each time, he loses material. Right around 15. 15, okay. I'm nervous, Ben. With only 15 pounds left, he's lost half the material. Now the challenge is to draw out the steel to the right shape. Let's measure it now. So we only gained, maybe an inch and a half, if that. They switch to hand-held hammers to stretch the metal more gently.

WASSON

Keep going. (clanging) Okay, all right, that's it.

NARRATOR

They've been working for days and are finally ready to see what they've wrought.

WASSON

This is what we were intending to be the top part, that it was going to be like this. We got plenty of distance here, but we certainly don't have the sides worked around to what they need to be. We need five inches more on each side, at least. Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

NARRATOR

After 200 hours of work, this piece of armor is no good. Ric can reforge the metal to be used for smaller pieces of the armor, but he'll need to start a large plate from scratch. (spectators cheering and yelling) In medieval Europe, armors weren't only produced for battle.

ANNOUNCER

A good strike from both of our competitors.

NARRATOR

Some of the best were designed for use in competitions. In Henry's time, as many as 10,000 spectators-- commoners and nobles alike-- attended events like this.

MAN

We can't hear you! (yelling)

CAPWELL

Tournaments and jousts were hugely popular in Henry's court. These are fabulously expensive spectacles, but at their heart, there's still real fighting there. It's all about your icy calm, your ability to hurl yourself into combat.

NARRATOR

Tournament armors were worn for short periods of time, so they could be heavy. This one belonging to Henry VIII weighs 94 pounds, twice the weight of a typical battle armor. It has no gaps anywhere. But whether for tournaments or battle, the perfect fit was crucial.

DEANE

There is a misconception about armor, that once you're in it, you can't really move. It's not true. Anything you can do out of an armor you should be able to do in armor, so either from this bizarre position or being thrown to the ground, you should be able to haul yourself up. Obviously not as quick. You're wearing sort of 70 pounds of armor, but you should be able to do it.

CAPWELL

They're engineered to follow the movements of the human body very precisely. Lumbering around, clunking around, would be a danger to your knightly dignity, as well as to your life. So it's just not acceptable. The stuff has to move.

WASSON

All these pieces, they should be resting on each other. That's how close it's got to be, so... Maybe you'd be able to fit a piece of paper underneath the plates, but it's got to be really close. So this is the first piece that needed to be fitted, and articulated and put together.

NARRATOR

Back in Long Island, Jeff uses the metal from the failed breastplate to make the armor's collar and neck pieces. That's the amount of curve that I want to put into this plate. For these and other missing pieces, he works from templates he's made from similar armors. Meanwhile, Ric is starting over. He's teamed with expert metalmaker Michael Pikula to figure out how to make a bigger piece of steel than last time.

The answer seems simple

start with more material. But it will still take hundreds of hours of work. Because flakes fall off every time they fire and pound the steel, they reheat it as infrequently as possible. Wide hammers help them spread the metal fast before it cools. Flip it, please, if you can. This is looking real good so far.

NARRATOR

A microscopic scan shows the metal Ric and his team have made has only a few impurities. They show up as dark spots. The metal is high-quality, and large enough that Jeff can now shape two pieces-- the breastplate and the placard that goes over it.

WASSON

So the heat in there is about 1,800 degrees. You can tell by the glow of the metal. We're working, like, at an orange-yellow heat. And at that temperature, the metal is like clay, and it will move, move pretty well for you. We got to be quick because the edge is thin. Towards the horn.

NARRATOR

He has to make the center of the breastplate four times thicker than the edge, and at the same time, give it its distinctive shape. Yeah, that's really good, that's nice. After weeks of pounding and shaping, there's one final step that transforms good armor

into great armor that's bulletproof

hardening the metal.

WILLIAMS

If you can work out how to harden steel, you can certainly double its strength, which means that it is then twice as resistant to bullets, as well as to other weapons.

NARRATOR

There are no surviving texts from the time accurately describing how they hardened armor, but Jeff has come up with a strategy.

WASSON

All this wiring on here is bracing to keep the piece from warping.

NARRATOR

He's going to heat-treat the armor in a process known as "the quench."

WASSON

You want the metal to be tough, but if it's too hard, it'll be brittle, so if a gun or a weapon hits it, it'll crack. With the heat-treating, you're causing a change in the crystal structure of the metal.

NARRATOR

Right now, magnifying the unhardened steel reveals many light areas. These regions are low in carbon, so the the iron atoms can slide past each other, making the armor too soft. Compared to this unhardened metal, the Greenwich armor has tightly interlocking grains, with carbon distributed evenly throughout. To achieve this hardness, Jeff will heat the steel so the grid of iron atoms expands and carbon can redistribute from high-concentration areas to low ones. Then he'll lock the carbon into place by cooling the armor quickly in oil. This new structure is harder, but more brittle, too. Heating the piece again will soften the metal slightly, so it can withstand an impact without cracking. The crystalline structure should now be more uniform and harder, like the original Greenwich armor.

WASSON

It's really extreme, going from really hot to being quenched in the oil. That's a huge shock on the metal. So the metal could warp or it could crack. It's dangerous, you know. It might not work out. It could destroy all the work I put into it so far. Okay. Oh, yeah, we're ready.

NARRATOR

A crack could mean disaster. He listens to see how the metal reacts. (crackling) Ooh. Do you hear that? (crackling) It was making strange cracking noises, but you know what? That's just what it's going to be. Jeff can't see any cracks in the placard that protects the breastplate. but he won't know its strength until the armor is tested.

WASSON

Now on to the other, bigger one. (murmurs) Yeah, that's good.

NARRATOR

This time, there's no cracking sound. The breastplate has come through unscathed. After a polish, it's ready to compare to the Greenwich steel of the time. Though there appear to be some concentrations of soft iron, visible as white blotches, the tight crystalline structure that gives the metal its strength is remarkably similar to the original. The quench seems to have done its job, but will the breastplate outperform the common armor and stand up to the musket? (gunshot)

TAVARES

Having just seen this, it's a little startling, you know, you see that big whopping hole. It's just it's a little scary, all this months of work on this piece and then, you know, you just got to be a little nervous, that's all.

NARRATOR

Nervous for good reason.

WILLIAMS

Certainly, if you were unlucky enough to be shot at by a musketeer at short range, then nothing is going to help you. You will be killed, and that's that.

NARRATOR

Jonathan wants to know what the ballistics experts think. You can't help but make assumptions sometimes, but the simple fact is through observation we've learned your assumptions means absolutely nothing, you have to put rounds on it to really understand what's going to happen, so... My gut tells me it's not going to penetrate.

CRONIN

It's significantly thicker armor, right? You have an air gap between the two plates, and you may have the opportunity for deflection. So you really do have a lot working to your advantage on the next shot. That doesn't mean that it will absolutely stop it. The musket is not... This is the super-weapon of the time. It's this... the next step is getting hit by a cannon. (blowing air) Pan's open. (gunshot)

TAVARES

Shoot. (chuckles) Just wait a few seconds. Gotta let the range clear. How are you feeling? Eh... (Cronin chuckles) Okay.

MASON

Watch the cables. Yup. Yeah. Oh man... right through? Nope! Wow! It held up. Held up pretty good, actually! (chuckling): Oh wow! There's just a dent, just a little bigger than my thumb.

NARRATOR

Even for modern ballistics experts, the armor has performed beyond expectation. Look at that.

CRONIN

The whole system, everything that we've looked at is impressive, from the firearm all the way through to the breastplate. I think they have all performed incredibly well.

TAVARES

Whoa... the bullet is gone.

Armor

one;

bullet

nothing.

NARRATOR

At 20,000 frames a second, they can see the musket ball disintegrate upon impact.

MASON

See how the curvature deflected it away?

TAVARES

Yeah, yeah... That goes to show you the peasecod belly, it's not just fashion, it's function.

NARRATOR

There's barely a dent on the breastplate. You can just tell where it happened, that's it.

CRONIN

I mean there's no question about it. This is something where the soldier wearing this armor gets to go home. Yes, you could stand down a musket at pretty close range, but how many people could afford this? You know? Not many people could have afforded this. This is the few and far between.

NARRATOR

The successful test fuels Jonathan's passion to complete the armor. Gilding, and etching, and completion. (chuckles) And then wearing. The elite knights who wore these armors wanted more than just protection-- they wanted to be covered in gold.

CAPWELL

As soon as you add gold, you make a statement about the knightly rank of the wearer. This one with this amount of decoration is a major step up in the social and economic pecking order.

NARRATOR

Adding gold was an expensive and involved process, and the team has to rediscover how the Greenwich armorers pulled it off. As a first step, Jonathan has asked Catherine Winings of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to copy the pattern that will be etched into the metal. Using a picture of the original armor, she paints Jeff's completed neck pieces. It's believed the Greenwich craftsmen used oil and lead paint to protect the surface of the armor from an acid that would eat away at the surrounding metal. The lines she's painting will be replaced by gold.

CATHERINE WININGS

For me, probably the most difficult are these little swirly things inside because I'm trying to imitate the marks of the person who was doing it originally, and so I have to try to kind of think the way that they would and adjust my marks accordingly.

NARRATOR

The next step will be to apply the acid that will eat away any place that isn't protected by the paint. The intricate pattern left behind will be embellished by gold.

TAVARES

It's meant to be fashionable. It's meant to mimic almost like the embroidery on your civilian clothing.

NARRATOR

Jonathan is using a technique from a 1531 book describing how the craftsmen likely etched their armor.

TAVARES

We had this a-ha moment. But what were the chemicals used? How do we understand this?

NARRATOR

A chemical historian identified the ingredients as a mixture of salt, vinegar, and copper sulfate, like root killer. This makes an acid paste that Jonathan hopes will eat through the metal.

TAVARES

One of the biggest revelations is that it wasn't submerging a plate into a bath of acid, it was using a paste and smearing that over the selected areas that you're hoping to etch. It's like icing a cake. The painted layer held up really well.

NARRATOR

He'll apply the acid again and scrub off the paint. Then the neckpiece, which has turned red in a chemical reaction, is ready to be covered in gold.

NARRATOR

The gilding itself takes place in Germany, where Dirk Meyer is one of a handful of craftsmen in the world who have mastered this medieval technique. Because gold doesn't bond easily to steel, getting it to stick requires many steps-- including mixing the gold with toxic mercury, then painting it on. Now the most dangerous step. Burning off the mercury. He works under a protective hood because the fumes can cause brain damage.

CAPWELL

They didn't care about safety, they didn't really understand the dangers fully.

WASSON

In the 19th century, hatters would use mercury to make felt hats. They would be breathing those fumes and that's where that term "mad as a hatter" comes from, because they all went crazy.

NARRATOR

The gilded piece is sent back to Jeff in Long Island. Wow! That is really fantastic. It just takes the piece to a whole new level. But there's still one more mystery to solve. In the only known painting of Lord Compton, the armor is blue-- which squares with evidence found on the original at the Art Institute of Chicago.

TAVARES

We found little dents around old rivets where the old blue finish was not completely scoured away.

NARRATOR

Jonathan believes blacksmiths heat-treated the armor until it was bright blue.

WASSON

When you look at these armors, they're magnificent in the museum, but they are hundreds of years old and they've been through a lot. We're bringing one to life, and we're going to see what it really looks like, you know, like when it was new. And that's going to be really exciting.

NARRATOR

Jeff will essentially have to rust his masterpiece by heating it to just the right temperature.

WASSON

It's what's called an oxide. An oxidation is rust where the oxygen in the atmosphere is reacting with the metal and creating a deposit. No change. With the heat, you are causing this oxidation to happen and it creates these colors.

NARRATOR

Instead of the red we associate with rust, heat shifts the color toward the blue part of the spectrum. Oh yeah, look at that. He checks the armor many times over half an hour until he thinks the color is just where he wants it. Just let it sit for a moment. All right, really close. Wow, that's looking really good. Finally, it's perfect. After more than a year of work, the riddle of how the Greenwich armorers made these bulletproof masterpieces has been solved.

TAVARES

I can't believe this. This is like holding the original. Well done, Jeff.

NARRATOR

Lord Compton's armor was completed around 1588, but within a few years, the knight in shining armor was receding into history.

KEITH DOWEN

The image of the knight in shining armor is a very romantic one and a very powerful one. However, in reality, full armor was only worn on the battlefield for roughly a period of 200 years.

NARRATOR

By the late 16th century, warfare was modernizing with the rise of guns and larger, more centralized governments-- knights were left behind.

SMITH

Within this new social formation, knights became really obsolete, as you had a military that a central government or a central king could put into force.

TAVARES

As you get closer to the 1600s, firearms completely take over and there's this slow evolution to where you use less and less armor. Whoa! (laughing) Oh my gosh, Jeff, I can't believe that. It's amazing, right? Really incredible. I don't believe I'm staring at me! Oh, my god. It's gorgeous!

CAPWELL

In the middle of the 17th century, you no longer have aristocratic heavy cavalry in full plate armor anymore. They started to be referred to as "the Lobsters" because they were these outlandish creatures that were already then like something kind of out of a storybook.

NARRATOR

It was the sunset of one technology and the dawn of a new one, but for a brief moment... (gunshot)...ingenious craftsmen helped keep the knight in shining armor alive.

ANNOUNCER

A 5,000-year-old

mystery

who built Stonehenge?

MAN

Oh, crikey. We don't see a lot of bone.

ANNOUNCER

Will these ancient bones... We have new methods of analysis....solve the puzzle? Have they come from somewhere else?

MAN

An aristocracy, an elite.

ANNOUNCER

Why did they build it, and what happened to them? We have found the smoking gun. Can science lay to rest the "Ghosts of Stonehenge"? Next time, on "NOVA." This "NOVA" program is available on DVD. To order, visit shopPBS.org, or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. "NOVA" is also available for download on iTunes.