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Renaissance Potters Were Nanotechnologists
Roland Piquepaille writes "In this article, Nature says that "tiny metal particles give 15th century Italian ceramics lustre." Nature adds that iridescent glazes -- changing colour when viewed from different perspectives -- were achieved by using "particles of copper and silver of between 5 and 100 billionths of a metre across." And the story becomes even more interesting. Nanotechnology meets alchemy! "The ability to change colour was regarded as an alchemical property, making iridescence magic too." Read this summary for more details. And for more information, you can read the abstract of this research paper, "Copper in glazes of Renaissance luster pottery: Nanoparticles, ions, and local environment," published by the Journal of Applied Physics."
Some currency now has a "hologram" printed on it which appears to use the same principle.
For example, some of the newer Canadian bills have a hologram in the corner that was introduced to foil counterfeiters. My understanding is that these were created by crushing up the stuff used to make laser-cut holographic images and applying it to the paper as a printing process.
This process sounds similar to the one described in the article.
-- clvrmnky
There is nothing new in the fact that even ancient processes can affect material on a very small scale (since they got a Nature paper, I am sure the particulars of this case are very intriguing).
The repeated beating of metal causes imperfections in the crystal structures which makes it harder. Japanese sword smiths knew what they were doing (or rather, did not know what they were doing) when they in a ritualistic manner repeadetely beat the metal, put it underground for a number of years, etc, etc.
Tor
Stained glass windows use a similar kind of nanoparticle emulsion concept to get their different colors (also based on particle size). We've known all of this for quite a while; it's nothing new.
Hear hear!
You know birds don't actually use blue pigments to achieve blue colorings? They use nanoscale keratin particles to contructively interfere in the blue range. If we believed slashdot editors, every bird with blue feathers should get a tenured position in nanotech.
You can't call something a nanotechnologist if they don't know they're working on a nano-scale.
The technique referred here is islamic lusterware and involves the firing of metallic salts on the glazed surface. It was not developed by the romans, as this poster suggests, nor was it "renaissance" era technology. The application of lusters to functional ceramcis can be traced to the persians around 900 a.d.
Spears do not fly, they follow a ballistic path which has nothing to do with flight. There are no surfaces on a spear that produce significant lift (and I am an Aerospace engineer ;-)
Yes it is. Nanotech is the ability to control feature size on a nanometer level, generally considered to be smaller than 200nm. They had the ability to do that, whether they knew it or not, as the iridescent patterns depend on the regular ordering of features around that size. Had they not had the ability, they would have ended up with some crappy glaze that didn't have this effect.
On a different topic - hey, look, nanotech for hundreds of years and no apocalypse as predicted by screwball science fiction! Amazing!
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I am dissapointed that the Nature article made no mention of the Islamic origins of lustreware. The process of lustre glazing predates the referenced Umbrian work by centuries.
Muslim potters invented the lustre process, which eventually worked its way into Spanish pottery in via the Moors. Only then did the process find its way to the Italian potteries of Umbria.
A very short google search turned up these interesting links:
Early Muslim Wares at artsofislam.org
11th century Egyptian lustre plate
but the actual title of the article is
And there's no reference to nanotechnologists in the abstract, so this seems more the submitter being poetic. Welcome to
Anyway, since Rennaissance artisans apparently viewed use of nanotechnology as magic, they would be more properly described as nanomagicians, which, incidentally, would make a good scifi title. (hint, hint
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