capillaries. His effort began the attempt to mathematically model the behavior of fluids under electrostatic forces. Further developments toward commercialization were made by Anton Formhals, and described in a sequence of patents from 1934 to 1944 for the fabrication of textile yarns. Electrospinning from a melt rather than a solution was patented by C.L. Norton in 1936 using an air-blast to assist fiber formation. In 1938 Nathalie D. Rozenblum and Igor V. Petryanov-Sokolov, working in Nikolai A. Fuchs' group at the Aerosol Laboratory of the L. Ya. Karpov Institute in the USSR, generated electrospun fibers, which they developed into filter materials known as "Petryanov filters". By 1939, this work had led to the establishment of a factory in Tver' for the manufacture of electrospun smoke filter elements for gas masks. The material, dubbed BF (Battlefield Filter) was spun from cellulose acetate in a solvent mixture of dichloroethane and ethanol. By the 1960s output of spun filtration material was claimed as 20 million m2 per annum. Between 1964 and 1969 Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor produced the theoretical underpinning of electrospinning. Taylor’s work contributed to electrospinning by mathematically modeling the shape of the cone formed by the fluid droplet under the effect of an electric field; this characteristic droplet shape is now known as the Taylor cone. He further worked with J. R. Melcher to develop the "leaky dielectric model" for conducting fluids. Simon, in a 1988 NIH SBIR grant report, showed that solution electrospinning could be used to produced nano- and submicron-scale polystyrene and polycarbonate fibrous mats specifically intended for use as in vitro cell substrates. This early application of electrospun fibrous lattices for cell culture and tissue engineering showed that various cell types would adhere to and proliferate upon the fibers in vitro. Small changes in the surface chemistry of the fibers were also observed depending upon the polarity of the electric field during spinning. In the early 1990s several research groups (notably that of Reneker and Rutledge who popularised the name electrospinning for the process) demonstrated that many organic polymers could be electrospun into nanofibers. Between 1996 and 2003 the interest in electrospinning underwent an explosive growth, with the number of publications and patent applications approximately doubling every year. Since 1995 there have been further theoretical developments of the driving mechanisms of the electrospinning process. Reznik et al. described the shape of the Taylor cone and the subsequent ejection