Slashdot Mirror
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
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.