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."

Comments

Meh

[cultobill]

That's not really nanotech. They weren't using the nanomaterials directly, or intentionally. The particles just happened to be the right size.

In Other News...

[Raindance]

... In other news, we're all 'Nanotechnologists'!

Seriously; we all use nanoproperties of materials to achieve macro results; just this morning I used nanotechnology in the form of nano-molecular-structure surface tension in my coffee, preventing spillage. I think this is very interesting but in the interests of linguistic integrity, having words actually *mean* something through exclusion, I question the spin that 'Renaissance Potters Were Nanotechnologists'; that implies a level of conceptual or technological understanding of nanophenomena which simply wasn't there.

Were Renaissance Potters clever? Yes. Were they 'Nanotechnologists'? No.

Using a fine powder is NOT nanotechnology

[Samir Gupta]

It doesn't take too much technology knowhow to grind something up into very fine bits.