An obsolete photographic technique that won a Nobel prize more than a century ago has been resurrected to create a novel material. It could be used to make bandages that warn medics if they are being wrapped too tightly.
It has been possible to make materials that change colour in laboratories, but scaling the process up has been difficult. Poor precision with which different colors can be printed on these materials has been a problem.
Benjamin Harvey Miller and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have revived a technique called Lippmann photography, named after physicist Gabriel Lippmann, to create a cheap method that could print even the most intricate designs in multicolour onto a stretchable material. The colors move along the spectrum of visible light with red sections first moving into greens and then blues.
Lippman never saw commercial success with the colour photography technique he developed in the 1890s, because exposure times of photographs often reached into hours and images couldn't be reproduced from negatives. His work earned him the prize in physics.
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