Paints that conduct electricity developed by a British company offers up some intriguing possibilities. Photo courtesy of Bare Conductive.
it is being applied. Egg yolk was a common binder in making artists’ paint, a product know as tempera. Vinegar or wine is added as an emul- sion agent and to keep the product from drying out too fast. Tempera paint is still in use today. Colours are very long lasting and look as fresh now as when they were painted hundreds of years ago. The challenge is to keep them from chipping or flaking, so they were often applied to wooden bases and protected by lacquers which also intensified their colours. Over the years, many products
have been added to paints to adjust their finish, act as fillers or in some way change the texture or look of the finished product. The Egyptians and Venetians added ground glass and sometimes ground gems to enhance transparency. Today, some paint manufacturers add sand and diatoma- ceous earth for the same reason and talcum, lime and clay to thicken paint. There is a whole long list of other additives for a variety of purposes.
www.localgardener.net Paint enters the digital age The purposes can be surprising.
There is an ongoing attempt to make paint an insulating product and there has been some success in making it so reflective that it can actually lower
the temperature on sun-bearing walls. However, electricity-conducting
paints are far more successful and in common use. You can buy electric- ity conducting paint in the form of a pen at Radio Shack. Developed by a group of students in the U.K., this technology is more of a novelty than a practical tool right now, but inven- tors are scheming all sort of interest- ing ideas for the future, including the thought that print may become inter- active so it can “talk back” to readers. If
insulating paint doesn’t work
that well, reasoned Prof. Paul Dastor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, why not solar heat? He has developed a paint that contains water dispersed photovoltaic cells that can be painted on plastic and spread over a rooftop to power an entire house. He hopes to soon make this avail- able as a product that can be directly painted on the surface not just of roofs but also automobiles to power our mobility.
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