slowly but surely we’re making good with the devices we thought the future held as children. Penny Brown’s video watch from Inspector Gadget? Check. The Starfleet tricoder of Star Trek? Almost there. But web shooting? Web slinger? It wasn’t one of us really thought would make the crossover. And neither was exactly in the plans for the scientist who made the strong, tough, air-spun web a reality, Marco Lo Presti, of Tufts University’s Silklab.

In 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor of biomedical engineering, worked on the challenge of underwater adhesives. The first material he chose to work on was composed of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way clams cling firmly to rock surfaces in water—something that has been useful in other applications.

“As I used acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine dust,” he says, “I noticed that it was undergoing a transition to a solid format, to a web-like material, to something that looks like a fiber I showed the vials to Fio, and we immediately started thinking about how we could make a distance adhesive [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] out of it.”

Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of engineering at Tufts and “puppeteer” of the Silklab. “We like to say that every experiment is carefully planned with comparisons and a lot of forethought, but it’s really about connection,” he says. “You explore and you play and you kind of connect the dots. Part of the play that is very underrated is where you say ‘hey wait a minute, is this like a Spider-Man thing?’ And you brush it off first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing.”

However, before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental webs, he had to complete his paper on underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. Much of the Silklab’s work is “bio-inspired” by spiders and silkworms, clams and fireflies, velvet worm slime, even tropical orchids—so figuring out if this sticky web can become something useful might seem like an easy sidestep for the team.

However, Lo Presti points out that while the new material does mimic spider threads, “there is no spider able to eject, to shoot a stream of solution that turns into a fiber and captures a distant object.” It was something new, at least to the real world.

But as the research paper in Advanced Functional Materials notes—enter fictional characters. In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original 1960s comic books, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15Peter Parker builds a “tiny device”, one attached to each wrist and activated by finger pressure, to produce strands of ejectable ‘spider webs’. By the time of the mid-2000s Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, has transitioned web-shooting from a wrist-worn spinning top device to an organic part of his superhero transformation.