Artificial Limbs
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
substitutes for human arms and legs, and parts thereof, the manufacture of which has received the attention of surgeons and mechanics from a very early date. In the great work on surgery, by Ambrose Paré, in 1579, he refers to, and gives detailed illustration of, an artificial arm and leg, and although the construction was of a rude character, they showed a very good attempt to conceal the mutilation. In 1696 an artificial leg was invented by Verduin, a Dutch surgeon. James Potts, of England, patented a new leg Nov. 15, 1800. This soon became celebrated as the "Anglesea leg," because it was so long worn by the Marquis of Anglesea. An improvement on this leg was patented by William Selpho, who was the first manufacturer of note in New York, where he established himself in 1839. The perfection to which limbs have been brought is wonderful and very interesting. A person with two artificial legs can walk so perfectly as to avoid detection, and a person with a single amputation can almost defy detection. Notable improvements in artificial limbs, and more particularly in legs, were made by C. A. Frees, of New York. One of these improvements, and one of the most important, consists in the movements of the knee and ankle joints, by which the whole limb is strengthened and made more durable. An important feature of this piece of mechanism consists in the introduction of a universal motion at the ankle-joint, imitating the astragalus movement with an additional joint, and thus producing a most perfect artificial substitute. The World War (1914-1918) created an unprecedented demand for artificial limbs, and the inventors, especially American, provided a variety of ingenious contrivances too numerous to describe. Artificial arms and hands are so constructed as to enable a person to grasp and hold objects, control movements, and perform most of the operations of the real arm. Artificial legs also show improvement, being light in weight, easily controlled, enabling a cripple to walk with ease and even grace.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 was writing about wood, leather and steel limbs whose highest ambition was concealment: a wearer could "almost defy detection." The materials went first, to aluminium, plastics and then carbon fibre, and the goal shifted from disguise to performance: the Flex-Foot sprinting blade of the 1980s led to Oscar Pistorius running in the 2012 Olympic 400 metres. The knee joint Collier's praised for its durability has been replaced in high-end legs by microprocessor-controlled units, of which Otto Bock's C-Leg, launched in the late 1990s, was the best known, and arms are now often myoelectric, driven by electrical signals picked up from the wearer's own remaining muscles rather than by shoulder harness and cable. Surgery has changed too, with implants anchored directly into the bone and nerve-transfer operations that let an amputee think a hand shut.
Written for this edition, 2026.