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For centuries, the printed page was one of the most effective ways to preserve and share information. In the digital age, engineers sought to reproduce the best qualities of paper without sacrificing many of the benefits of an electronic screen. The result was a technology that uses remarkably little power, remains readable in bright sunlight, and can hold an image even when the electricity is turned off. Learn more about the history and technology of E Ink and electronic paper on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile. There are things in life that you do not want to be transparent, like your swimsuit or your search history. But when it comes to your wireless bill, transparency is everything. That's why Mint Mobile's wireless plans have no gimmicks and no gotchas, just high speed data and reliable coverage on the T Mobile 5G network. And right now, all plans are $15 a month, even the unlimited plan. It works on your current phone, your current phone number, and you can keep all of your contacts. That's why I recommend Mint Mobile. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.comeed that's mintmobile.comeed cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.comeed that's it. There's no catch. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month new customers on first three month plan only speed slower above 40gb on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. This episode is sponsored by Drip Drop. If you've been watching the World cup for the last few weeks, you may have noticed that they added something called a hydration break. They will briefly stop the game for the players to hydrate. And it isn't just a play for extra television ads. There is a real concern about the athlete's hydration. Well, you don't have to be in the World cup to require proper hydration. Drip Drop uses science based formulas for rapid hydration so you feel the results fast while getting three times the electrolytes of leading sports strengths. It has six key electrolytes as well as 15 essential vitamins and nutrients. Dripdrop is trusted by firefighters, medical professionals and over 90% of top college and pro sports teams. And I use Drip Drop. I'm a fan of the zero sugar version. Right now DripDrop is offering podcast listeners 20% off your first order. Go to dripdrop.com and use promo code, everything. That's dripdrop.com, promo code, everything for 20% off. Stock up now@dripdrop.com and use promo code Everything. Before I start, I should make a note about the terminology used in this episode. The terms E Ink and E Paper are used interchangeably. However, E Ink is actually the name of a company and is a trademark, while Electronic paper, or ePaper, is the broader category of display technologies. E Ink holdings has become so dominant in the market that its brand name is often used generically, much like Kleenex is sometimes used for facial tissue or Google is used for doing an Internet search. Also, just to put Epaper into context, I'll briefly describe how LCD displays, which are used in most devices today, work. An LCD or liquid crystal display, uses a backlight that shines through a layer of liquid crystals. Each pixel contains red, green, and blue subpixels. Electrical signals change the alignment of the liquid crystals, controlling how much light passes through each colored subpixel. By combining different amounts of red, green, and blue light, the screen produces millions of different colors. There are other similar technologies and variations of lcd, but for the purpose of this episode, they all have in common the fact that they actively emit light and require continuous power to produce an image. If your battery dies or your power goes out, the screen will go blank. Researchers wondered if it was possible to create a display that had some of the best features of a screen, in that it could be updated and refreshed, but also share some of the best features of good old fashioned paper. The fundamental idea behind electronic paper emerged from display research in the 1960s and 70s, when cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, were still the dominant form of display technology. Engineers were trying to create screens that would be thin, portable, readable in ordinary light, and capable of rendering an image without constantly drawing power. One of the first important technologies in this field was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research center, better known as Xerox PARC. During the 1970s, researcher Nicholas Sheridan created a system called gyrocon, a name derived from the Greek words associated with rotation and and images. Gyrocon consisted of millions of tiny plastic spheres embedded in a flexible transparent sheet. Each sphere was black on one side and white on the other. The two sides also carried different electrical charges, positive or negative. When an electrical field was applied, the spheres rotated so that either the black or white side faced the viewer. What was genius about this system is that once the spheres had turned, they stayed in position without requiring continuous power. In principle, a gyrocon sheet could display text or images and retain them indefinitely and then be rewritten. Sheridan constructed an early prototype in 1975 and patented the twisting ball display concept in 1978. Xerox eventually created a subsidiary to commercialize Gyrocon, particularly for reusable signs, but the company struggled to produce displays that were cheap enough. Xerox closed the subsidiary in 2005. Although the work established many of the principles later associated with electronic paper, the direct ancestor of modern E ink was developed at the MIT Media Lab during the 1990s. Physicist Joseph Jacobson imagined an electronic book that could store many titles while retaining the physical qualities of paper. Working with several MIT students, Jacobsen's group developed a new form of what was called microencapsulated electrophoretic ink. And that's a mouthful, but the technology is conceptually pretty easy to understand. Rather than attempting to manufacture perfectly divided black and white microspheres, the researchers suspended electrically charged pigment particles in a fluid. They then enclosed the fluid in microscopic capsules. Instead of half a sphere having to have an electrical charge in a different color, a whole sphere had its own charge in its own color. When the electrical charge in the device was changed, the spheres would rise or fall inside the microcapsule. The movement of fluids due to an electrical charge is known as electrophoresis. This breakthrough was important because microencapsulation made electrophoretic displays more durable and easier to manufacture. Each capsule served as a tiny controlled container, preventing particles from spreading across a screen, reducing leakage and uneven movement. The team published its work in the scientific journal Nature in July of 1998. The paper described an electrophoretic ink that combined low power consumption, high reflectivity, wide viewing angles, and the ability to manufacture displays via printing and coating processes. The research team founded E Inc. Corporation in 1997 to commercialize the technology. The company emerged from the MIT Media Lab and initially experimented with signs and other large displays before focusing on high resolution panels for handheld devices. A modern black and white electrophoretic display contains several layers. On the top is a transparent protective surface. Beneath that is the electrophoretic material, made up of millions of microscopic capsules or small compartments, and behind this is an array of electrodes controlled by thin film transistors. Each microscopic capsule contains a clear fluid and two types of pigment particles in a common arrangement. The white particles have one electrical charge and the black particles have the opposite charge. When a voltage is applied across a capsule, the electric field attracts one group of particles towards the front and pushes the other group towards the back. When white particles move towards the viewing surface, that area appears white, and when black particles move towards the surface, it appears black. Intermediate shades of gray can be created by combining particle positions, pulse sequences, or spatial dithering. The E Ink Corporation describes its capsules as being approximately the diameter of a human hair. One of the defining properties of electrophoretic displays is called bistability. As I mentioned earlier, a conventional display requires electrical power to maintain or illuminate the image. In an E Ink display, the pigment particles tend to remain where they have been placed after the electric field is removed. As a result, an E Ink screen generally uses most of its display related power only when the image changes. Once a page, price or sign has been drawn, the screen can retain it for days, months, or even years without consuming any power to keep the image visible. The electronic ink is only one part of the display. A practical screen also requires a backplane capable of controlling the individual pixels. Each pixel is connected to a thin film transistor. The transistor applies carefully timed positive and negative voltage pulses that move the pigments. These sequences are called waveforms. Changing a pixel is not always as simple as applying one voltage. The particles inside the microcapsules have inertia. They interact with fluid and may retain some memory of their previous position. The controller may move through several intermediate stages before finally setting on the intended shade. E Ink's first commercial demonstrations involved large signs rather than books. Its first prototype signs were shown in 1999 and could be updated electronically while retaining their information without continuous power. The company also worked with Lucent Technologies on flexible display prototypes around 2000. The first widely recognized consumer E Reader using E Ink technology was Sony's Libre, introduced in Japan in 2004. It demonstrated that electrophoretic displays could support a viable consumer device. But the E Ink product that many of you are probably best familiar with is the Amazon Kindle. Amazon introduced the original Kindle on November 19, 2007. It combined an E Ink screen with wireless book purchasing and delivery. Earlier E Readers often required users to connect the device to a computer and manually transfer files. The Kindle allowed readers to browse, purchase, and download books directly in the device. The Kindle did not invent electronic reading, and it was not the first E Reader. Its importance came from integrating the screen, bookstore, wireless network and publishing ecosystem in one product. The success of the Kindle greatly increased production volumes for electrophoretic displays. Competing products from Sony, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Pocketbook, and many others expanded the market. And here I want to interject my own personal experience with the Kindle. The Kindle was released about six months after I began traveling around the world and when you travel you have a lot of downtime. I would always have a book with me. The problem was that books are heavy and finding English language books in a non English speaking country is usually both difficult and and expensive. And they're also heavy. And I found myself carrying several books around because I couldn't bring myself to get rid of them. After a few years I purchased a Kindle for myself and it was literally a game changer. I now had something lightweight with access to the world's biggest bookstore right at my fingertips. The power of the Kindle became evident to me in 2014 when I was boarding a ship in Cape Town bound for the island of St. Helena. I was on the ship and realized that I had nothing to read for almost a month without Internet access. So I ran up to the top deck of the ship, downloaded the entire Game of Thrones series via 3G in just a few minutes and was set for the rest of the voyage. Black and white E Ink displays have been appearing in stores recently because they can automatically display and update prices. But one of the biggest advances in E Ink has been the development of color E Ink displays, and one of the most popular technologies was developed by the E Ink Corporation as Advanced Color Epaper. In a multi pigment system, particles of different colors exhibit distinct electrical properties. Carefully designed voltage sequences separate and position the desired pigments at the viewing surface. A full color system might use cyan, magenta, yellow, yellow and white particles. By placing different combinations near the surface, it can reproduce a broad range of colors. The colors are not as vibrant or bright as they are in a normal LCD monitor, but the quality is surprisingly good. There are now products on the market that are color E Ink displays to hang on the wall that are the size of a framed picture or a poster. And the brilliant thing about them is that they use little electricity and you can change the image to whatever you want at any time. Another advantage of Epaper over LCD monitors is that it can be used in full sunlight. If you've ever tried to view the screen on your smartphone on a sunny day, you've probably experienced the problem. They work better without direct light on the screen. Epaper works well in the sun because there's no backlight. There are Epaper signs that are being installed for outdoor use which require a low power solution that can easily be read during the day. One of the biggest weaknesses of Epaper devices has been the refresh rate of the screen. Some of the first generation devices took a noticeably long time to refresh the screen with new content. But some of the newest generation of epaper screens have gotten remarkably better. I recently saw a YouTube video of someone who had hacked an Epaper device and managed to get a 60Hz refresh rate on it. With it, he was able to get it to function as a reasonably good laptop monitor, albeit in black and white. I can safely say that you will probably never have a television made out of e paper. The image quality just can't match what a high end LCD monitor can produce. But that being said, there are epaper smartphones on the market today, but high end televisions and monitors was never the purpose of this technology. Epaper serves a very definite niche. Any signage or device that doesn't need to be refreshed constantly is a perfect candidate for an epaper screen. So if you haven't seen them out in the wild already, you'll probably start seeing more of them in the years to come. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible, and I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. Links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read on the show.