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

"Nanotechnology" is an overused term

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't RTFA, so I don't know if it was the author or the submitter who attached this trendy term to a story about ceramic glazes. But unless the potters in question were building microscopic robots, they weren't "nanotechnologists" in the generally understood sense of the word.

People have been using finely ground substances of one sort or another at least since the mortar and pestle were invented.

Forget terminology

[LilJC]

Whether this is technically nanotechnology or not, I still find it very interesting. I always wondered how alchemists continued to find work after without ever making gold.

I suppose we still do the same thing current day - people are ever searching for perpetual motion machines and researching anti-gravity. Every time someone puts together a device the layman can't figure out, funding pours in and our modern alchemists continue employment in various potentially unsolvable problems.

Myself, I prefer Feymann's approach: considering how likely you are to solve a problem as well as how valuable the solution is (not to mention how many others could solve the problem).

Re:Same (?) principle is used in some currency

[tmasssey]

This is *exactly* what was done to add the "color-shifting ink" on U.S. Currency.

A company attempted to put a hologram on a bill. However, one of the tests it had to pass was a test that crushed the currency. This broke down the intereference pattern, destroying the hologram. So, they got the idea of chopping up the hologram into tiny bits, mixing it into an ink-type base and applying it to the bill that way.

Voila! Color-shifting ink.