Before 2020, no one probably had imagined that face masks would be one of the best-selling items as they today. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this item has become a must-have item in this era. The records from The Travels of Marco Polo, the 13th century travelogue of the famous Italian who once travelled to China and visited the Yuan dynasty from the 1279 to 1368, give a glance at how the origins of a face mask can be traced. They highlight that servants of the emperor had silk scarves to cover their mouths and noses when they were serving meals at the emperor’s table. It was believed that the scarves would keep the servants’ breath from impacting the smell and taste of the food. During the 14th century, the Black Death (a devastating global epidemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe and Asia) spread to Europe, promoting the emergence of functional face mask-like objects. This went along in the 16th century, when French Doctor Charles de Lorme invented the beak mask. He also installed some glasses in the eye sockets to filter out the diseases. In that same century, the famous painter Leonardo da Vinci invented a soaking cloth in water and placing it on his face in order to filter out toxic chemicals coming from people’s respiratory systems. However, the design of a face mask made a great stride in 1827 when the Scottish scientist Robert Brown discovered “Brownian motion” which highlighted the protective effect of masks from dust. In 1848, the mask made by American Lewis Hassley for miners obtained the first patient for a protective mask, becoming one of the face masks’ milestones in its history. After thirteen years, Louis Pasteur, a French biologist proved the presence of bacteria in the air, making more people pay attention to the design of modern masks. With the case of various pandemics, the design of masks kept evolving from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003, smog in 2012 (both of them in china) and now the grounding of Coronavirus in 2019.
