the Enola Holmes movie based on the Enola Holmes book series which I have not read but would now
like to, is basically the fourth wall breaking teen girl self-insert fanfic of Sherlock Holmes
that i did not know i wanted spoilers but when i watched it i came away with one big question that
i felt compelled to answer: would a corset really stop a knife my name is Jill Bearup
and on this channel our tagline yes we have a tagline is storytelling through fight scenes.
some people think of fight scenes as a lot of sound and fury signifying not much at all
and in some cases they are not wrong but a good fight scene should inform us about plot and/or
characters and a great fight scene will do both those things and give us something to remember.
preferably something that ties in with the themes or plot or characters in the story
enter Enola's whalebone corset. the scene is this Enola Holmes little sister of Sherlock and Mycroft
Holmes has made her way to London in search of her missing mother she is in the east end when
she is unexpectedly attacked by bowler hat aka Linthorn. Linthorn is looking for Tewksbury whose
life Enola saved earlier in the film. Linthorn dunks Enola repeatedly in a barrel of water by
way of an interrogation technique she escapes they have a hand-to-hand fight which averages one cut
per second and is intercut with another fight this one Enola learning to fight from her mother
but anyway. Enola attempts the corkscrew for the second time in the film fails is shoved back into
the suffragette building. Linthorn follows her pulls a knife and stabs her everything goes black
but wait he pulls back confused the knife having failed to penetrate, and Enola rips back the
fabric of her dress to reveal that her corset has saved the day! there are a couple of fight details
i really like. I like that she pins her hair back before they get into the fight I like the rule of
three that they set up with the corkscrew and I love that they gave the corset this
random starring role but when i saw this scene my first thought was would that actually work? turns
historical examples of women being saved by their corsets. We'll come back to the maths.
Mary Sarah Phillips was a poor woman from Barnsley who separated from her husband Charles in 1888.
after coming over to her parents house a bunch of times to plead for her to come back he abducted
their baby yeah great guy some days later like over a week later she got a note saying that the
baby was ill and that she should meet Charles in a particular park so she took along miner friend
Thomas Siddons and off they went. Charles Phillips was reportedly so enraged by seeing her with a man
that he ran up stabbed her in the back knocked her to the ground and then stabbed her repeatedly
until the blade of the knife broke in fact Charles Phillips was incidentally apprehended
after a female passerby saw what he was doing, ran up and clocked him on the head with her umbrella.
i feel like i might have previously mentioned that umbrellas are quite useful as improvised weapons
anyway they later discovered that Mary's corset had deflected no fewer than eight knife strikes
so yeah her life was almost certainly saved by her corset. Enola is wearing a whalebone corset which
is probably what Mary Sarah Phillips had on. steel boned corsets have been known to deflect bullets
see for example the case of Edith Bowman in 1890 in Omaha Nebraska. so anecdotally it's not that
unreasonable for a corset to turn aside a single knife blow. but maybe you are not interested in
historical anecdotes because you are a scientist all right back of the envelope maths time a kevlar
vest will stop a 9mm bullet meaning it can cope with at least 467 joules of energy baleen which
is what we mean when we say whalebone in this context is about three percent as strong as kevlar
and so can probably cope with about 14 joules after which we would assume that it would crack,
which it did. A reasonable energy estimate for a stab by a male assailant: 24 to 33 joules. Good
start we like this. assuming at this point that the blade can't actually do any stabbing because
the structure of the corset is preventing it from pushing the fibers further apart and
reaching Enola's skin, there are only about 19 Joules remaining at a maximum. Given that the
silk dress and the fabric over the baleen will require energy to break through, given that the
corset is spreading the force of the blow over a wider area, given that a punch (for comparison
purposes) carries about 150 Joules of energy, and given that someone trained in fighting would try
to ride the blow backwards, she should be fine. All this to say, it's not unreasonable at all
to assume that if you stab someone in one of the bones of their whalebone corset,
you will crack the whalebone but you may well leave the person underneath unharmed.
That being said kids don't try this at home so instead of conducting dangerous and illegal
experiments I have two suggestions which you may prefer. The first one is if you're looking
at these numbers and thinking 'I don't know...' is to leave a comment with your own calculations
if you're not into that i understand because most people don't actually want to do maths in their
leisure time in which case subscribe and maybe watch some more videos! Hope to see you soon.