This 1,600-Year-Old Goblet Shows that the Romans Were Nanotechnology Pioneers

The Romans were genius.

The had the baths, the vomitoria, the toga parties, the aquaducts, the fingers.

And they had goblets that change color as light went through them and as different liquids are filled into it. In fact, the science is pretty stunning...

researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.

...

[T]he researchers ... imprinted billions of tiny wells onto a plastic plate about the size of a postage stamp and sprayed the wells with gold or silver nanoparticles, essentially creating an array with billions of ultra-miniature Lycurgus Cups. When water, oil, sugar solutions and salt solutions were poured into the wells, they displayed a range of easy-to-distinguish colors—light green for water and red for oil, for example. The proto­type was 100 times more sensitive to altered levels of salt in solution than current commercial sensors using similar techniques.

Clearly, the lead hadn't kicked in just yet when these goblets were being made.