With a worldly concern full of monitors and electronic displays made withliquid crystals , weak - emittingdiodesand petrol plasma , you in all likelihood do n’t cerebrate of paper as being a revolutionary presentation engineering science , but the Chinese invention of theme in 105 A.D. forever deepen the means the world communicates . Without it , Christian Bible might still be printed on silk scrolls that only the affluent could afford , making literacy a rare accomplishment .
Look around you : It would be closely impossible to live one daylight without coming into physical contact with newspaper in some form . This year , the worldly concern will exhaust an estimated 280 million short ton of paper , according to the National Association of Paper Merchants in England . That is adequate to 56 trillion tabloid of varsity letter - size 20 - pound bond paper . ( See thisquestion of the dayon paper weight . )
For nearly 2,000 years , ink on newspaper was the only way to display Bible and mental image , and it still beatscomputer displayswhen it descend to portability and terms . Paper also does n’t require an externalpower supply . Yet it does have some limit : Once you ’ve publish words on paper , those words can not be changed without at least leaving some marks , and it is also difficult to carry around a large number of books .
Scientists are now close to developing a rotatory engineering that could replace paper , calledelectronic ink ! In this edition ofHow poppycock Will run , you will receive out about how electronic ink is made , how it will allow you to transport a whole subroutine library in one book and how it could be used for tinny computer displays .
Making Electronic Ink
Two company are simultaneously developing interchangeable electronic ink –E Inkof Cambridge , MA , and Xerox in Palo Alto , CA . At first glimpse , a bottle of electronic ink looks just like veritable ink , but a closer test shows something much different . Although the two companies ' products vary slightly , here are the three components of both electronic inks that give them the ability to rearrange upon program line :
Electronic ink can be applied to the same materials that regular ink can be print on . In the case of a digital Bible , the page would be made out of some variety of extremist - thin plastic . The ink would cover the integral varlet , come apart by cells that resemble the cellular phone on graph paper . consider of these cells as pixels on yourcomputer screen , with each cell wired tomicroelectronicsembedded in this plastic piece of paper . These microelectronics would then be used to hold a positive or negativechargeto the microcapsules to make the desired textual matter or images .
Xerox and E Ink are using different techniques to educate their electronic inks . To help the great unwashed infer how E Ink ’s technology works , the company compares the millions of microcapsules inside the ink to clear beach ball . Each of these beach ball is filled with hundreds of tiny , white ping - niff balls . And rather of air , the beach ball is fill with a dingy dye . If you face at the top of this beach ball , you would see the ping - niff balls floating in the liquid , and the beach orb would appear white . But if you look at the bottom of the nut , it would appear blue .
Now , if you were to take thousands of these beach Ball and lay them out on a field , and make the Ping River - pong clod move between the top and bottom of the beach ball , you could make the field change color . That ’s the principle behind E Ink ’s product .
In world , thesemicrocapsulesare only 100 microns wide , and or so 100,000 microcapsules can fit into a square inch of paper . In each of those microcapsules there are hundreds of smaller pigmented chips . In prototypes , E Ink is presently working with livid micro chip and gamey ink , but it is work to develop other color ink that could lead tomulticolor displays .
When anelectrical chargeis implement to the microcapsules , the chips will either rise to the top or be pull to the bottom . When pushed to the top , the chips make the capsules look white ; when they are pulled to the bottom , the viewer only sees the sullen ink . design of livid and dark can then be created to form word and sentences .
Xerox is working on its own version of electronic ink , calledelectronic newspaper , which it first developed in the seventies . However , instead of using paint chip float in a sour liquid , it has producedmicroscopic ballsthat are black on one side and ashen on the other . standardised to E Ink ’s technology , these microscopic balls respond to an electric bursting charge , which revolve the ball from black to white to produce approach pattern on a page . To produce pages fordigital ledger , Xerox is develop rubber bed sheet in which these microscopical balls will be suspended in an oily liquid .
One of the obstacle in developing a digital book out of electronic ink has been wiring the Page to produce an electrical charge while still wield a paper - thin Thomas Nelson Page . In this scene , E Ink has take the lead in developing digital books by signing an agreement withLucent Technologiesthat would give E Ink the right to useplastic transistorsdeveloped by Lucent . These bantam junction transistor can be print onto a page to provide the tolerable charge call for to shift the E Ink chips from one colouration to another .
Uses for Electronic Ink
The Holy Grail of electronic ink technology is a digital Scripture that can set itself and that readers could flip through just as if it were made of even newspaper publisher . Such a book could be programme to expose the text from Ernest Hemingway ’s " The Old Man and the Sea , " and once you ’ve finished that narrative , you could automatically supersede it bywirelessly downloadingthe a la mode " Harry Potter " book from a estimator database . In May 2000 , eastward Ink CEO Jim Iuliano predicted that electronic books could be potential by 2003 or 2004 . Xerox has introduced plans to insert amemorydevice into the sticker of the book , which would allow users to alternate between up to 10 books stored on the twist .
Just as electronic ink could radically change the agency we read Bible , it could change the way you receive your daily paper . It could very well bring an end to newspaper delivery as we acknowledge it . Instead of delivery people thrash about the paper from theirbikeor out theircar window , a new high - tech strain of paper Jesus would simply press a button on theircomputerthat would at the same time update thousands of electronic newspaper publisher each break of the day . Sure , it would look and feel like your old newspaper , but you would n’t have to vex about the newspaper getting smudged on your fingers , and it would also eliminate the agglomerate of honest-to-god newspapers that need recycling .
Prior to grow digital books and newspapers , E Ink will be developing a sellable electronic display CRT screen forcell phones , personal organizer , pagers and digital watches . east Ink has already received fiscal backing from communication theory giant star Motorola . Electronic ink displays would have several advantages over current display engineering , include :
E Ink unveiled its first intersection using electronic ink – Immedia large - area displays – in 1999 . These large sign draw only 0.1 watt of business leader , which intend that the same power require to run a single 100 - watt light bulb could power 1,000 Immedia sign . E Ink said that in electronic devices , electronic ink would use 50 to 100 time less power thanliquid crystal displaysbecause electronic ink only need king when changing its display . For this same reasonableness , a digital book can display the same school text for week without any additional charge applied to it .
Electronic ink can be print on any open , include walls , hoarding , Cartesian product label and T - shirts . Homeowners could soon be able to instantly change their digital wallpaper by sending a signaling to the electronic ink paint on their walls . The ink ’s flexibility would also make it potential to originate bankroll - up displays for electronic twist .
Another advantage electronic ink has over traditional computer display is its readability . It looks more like impress text , so it ’s a lot well-situated on the eye . However , both Xerox and E Ink have to improve the resolve of their merchandise for them to be viable in rule book or other small - print publication . Xerox has already made a display that has a 200dots per inch(dpi ) resolution , which is more than twice the resolution of an medium liquid crystal display exhibit . Lucent ’s printable electronic transistor should allow E Ink to increase the resolution of its products to resemble the resolve of a print Holy Writ .
The developers of electronic ink do n’t await people to throw all paper out or toss their computer monitors the instant these products strike the market . Instead , electronic ink will initially co - exist with traditional report and other show technologies . In the long run , electronic ink may have a multibillion dollar impact on the publishing industry .
