99% Invisible - 386- Their Dark Materials

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

Vantablack is a pigment that reaches a level of darkness that’s so intense, it’s kind of upsetting. It’s so black it’s like looking at a hole cut out of the universe. If it looks unreal because Vantablack isn’t actually a color, it’s a form of nanotechnology. It was created by the tech industry for the tech industry, but this strange dark material would also go on to turn the art world on its head. Their Dark Materials

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. About a year ago, we released an episode in which I interviewed the author of Cassia St. Clair about her book The Secret Lives of Color. It was a conversation about the history and origins of different colors throughout human existence. And during our talk, Cassia and I covered everything from a type of purple that squeezed from seasnails to a shade of green that could literally kill you. a type of purple that's squeezed from seasnails to a shade of green that could literally kill you. But there was one pigment in particular from that episode that one of our producers here at Nine N.I.P.I. hasn't been able to stop thinking about.

Because it's bonkers. Producer Vivian Le. It's called Vanta Black. And it's a pigment that reaches the level of darkness that's so intense, it's kind of upsetting. It's so black, it's like looking at a hole cut out of the universe. It's so black, it's like looking at a portal into another dimension of nothingness. It's so black that if you've stared it long enough, you'll see your own death.

I can keep going. These metaphors are crummy, but it's like this philosophical abyss, your eyes just fall into it. This is Adam Rogers. I'm a journalist. I'm a writer at Wired, and I write books sometimes too. Rogers has written about Vandablack for Wired because when anyone sees it, not just Vivian, they think it's bonkers. It makes you rethink what black means.

Vandablack is striking when you look at it, even when you look at a picture of it, because it looks not like something is colored black. It looks like unabsence. Vanta black swallows nearly all visible light and gives back no reflection. So every contour or crease of whatever it's applied to disappears. It has this odd effect of making something look too dimensional, well at the same time as if you could fall right through it. It has the same feeling looking at it as a color that looking over the edge of a building

or something does. You actually do feel kind of a physiological response. That does not look right. That looks unreal. It looks unreal. Vanta Black was created by the tech industry for the tech industry, but this strange dark material would actually go on to turn the art world on its head. There are black pigments out there, and then there are super black pigments that are so dark they need to be created in a laboratory. These super blacks reach such extreme levels of darkness because they're made up of something called carbon nanotubes, or CNTs. Carbon nanotubes are pretty much exactly what they sound like. Teeny, tiny microscopic tubes comprise of carbon atoms just a few nanometers wide. For reference, a single human hair is about 80 to 100,000 nanometers wide.

CNT materials are made up of forests of these microscopic carbon tubes. I'd say it's like a field of grass, okay, and the grass is a carbon anotube and about 1,6,000 to thickness of your hair, and there's about a billion of them per square centimeter. This is Ben Jensen, the founder and CTO of Surinano Systems, which specializes in carbon nanotube technology. He's the kind of person who, even as a kid, you'd expect to become the founder and CTO of a carbon nanotube technology company. When I went through school, I spent my time trying to make gunpowder type rockets, and

then I kind of went to develop liquid propellant systems that were rather dangerous and used to go bang and kind of not very safe. Back then, people didn't really care that much about safety and they go, yeah, yeah, this sounds like a really cool idea. Kids, this is not a really cool idea. Jensen began working in the nanomaterials field in 2004. Back then, CNTs had a lot of promise in this based industry because super black coatings could be really useful inside of satellites, telescopes, and optical imaging technology.

But carbon nanotube technology wasn't quite where it needed to be yet. C&T's weren't like paint. They had to be grown onto a surface in a special type of reactor at an absurdly high temperature. High enough to destroy most of the things you might want to grow them on. Jensen and his team worked on it for years and finally managed to develop a new reactor that allowed them to grow CNTs at a much lower temperature. And in doing so, they had one unexpected but delightful side effect.

They made it blacker. One day we got some data back and they said, do you realize what you've done? You've grown this material and it's got almost unmeasurably low reflectance and I was okay. What does that mean? It meant that sereninous systems had created the darkest substance on earth a material that absorbed 99.965 percent of light He couldn't tell from the numbers, but Jensen knew the CNT was really special after one of his researchers showed him a sample.

And he said, look, and I'm like, okay, what am I looking at? It just looks black. And he said, no, no, look. And I'm putting my face right up beside it, and the guy is looking and laughing at me. And I'm going, hey, I just looks black. And then he did something that just told me we'd nailed it. He took an object off the surface that was three-dimensional, so I could then see it. Before no matter how close I'd put my eyes to it, I couldn't tell there was anything there. It was just flat. Vanta Black was so dark that it almost felt like it defied the laws of physics. We weren't looking to create the world's blackest material. That wasn't our thing.

Jensen and his team decided to give this new flashy CNT of flashy name, Vanta Black. Which stands for vertically aligned nano tube array, black. As black as Vanta Black was, serenano systems still saw it as a niche material. So when they launched their product at the Farmboro Air Show in 2014, they saw themselves as small fry.

Farmboro is a big deal in the aerospace industry. Surrey Nano systems was presenting their Nano material at the same event as the Boeing Dreamliner, military jets, and a paragliding car. So Jensen wasn't expecting to make much of a splash. But that's not what actually happened. It was just surreal. We had camera crews from literally all the major networks there filming, looking at these materials, because no one had ever seen anything demonstrated like this before. People were freaking out over Vanta Black.

We just didn't expect it, and my scientist was like, well, it's just black. Why are we getting all these people going crazy about it? over Vanta Black. We just didn't expect it, and my scientist was like, well, it's just black. Why are we getting all these people going crazy about it? People were amazed by the depth of darkness achieved by Vanta Black and wanted to know more. Soon enough, serenino systems was receiving all sorts of requests from people who wanted a piece of it. You've got people wanting to coat their cars in it.

People wanting to coat dice in it, coat their bodies in it. We had a very well-known YouTube that spent quite a while asking us saying can we please eat it live on YouTube. Aside from that time-part eating f***ing idiot, what really caught Jensen's attention was the amount of interest that came from another field in desperate need of a super black pigment, the art world. In those first couple of weeks alone, Serenano systems received over 400 inquiries

from artists wanting to use it in their work. The number of people in the art world that wanted to use it, that was absolutely quite a crazy time, actually, because we're a company that's set up to do engineering and space, not a company that's set up to create products for artists to use. Working with artists was just not something Surin Anosystems was equipped to do, because Vant Black was incredibly hard to work with. Sure, they could grow it at a much lower temperature than before, but that was still about 430 degrees centigrade. C&T's were also really delicate and could scrape off easily.

But most importantly, any collaboration with artists would take up time and tech resources because anything coated with band-a-black would have to be grown in Serene Anosystems reactors. Just wasn't a practical proposition for the company. That said, Anish is an incredibly charismatic chap with an amazing vision and his life's work has just been phenomenal. Anish, as in Anish Kapoor, who if you haven't heard of him before, is very famous. So Anish Kapoor for decades has been one of the premier contemporary artists working today. This is Adam Rogers again. He's the kind of person who will do like a whole gallery

takeover of the tape modern. You know, he's a really big deal. We should know here that Anishka War did not respond to an interview request for this story, but he's probably best known for creating Chicago's iconic Cloud Gate sculpture, also known as the Bean, and he has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to visual arts.

And when Vance of Black debuted, he wanted it. So he reached out to Surinano Systems and invited Jensen to check out his studio. I walked into his studio and I was literally speechless at what I saw. Given his body of work, Kapoor seemed uniquely suited for this material. suited for this material. There is in a way a constant continuous process that gives up the same questions. This is Anish Kapoor in a video he released about one of his pieces titled Disension. So those questions are for me, you know, the void object or the non-object. Many questions about colour, questions about space and time, because I really do believe that for there to be new objects, there has to be new space.

Kapoor has a fascination with black's capacity to make something both exist and not exist at the same time. His work, a lot of it, deals with voids, deals with color blocks and voids, tries to understand the relationship between color and space. One art installation titled Descent in Delimbo is just a giant black hole in the ground that looks like it plummets into oblivion. There was a circle on the floor that was just blacker than black could possibly be.

A couple of years ago, somebody actually fell into it. Now to the Italian man who found out the hard way that a very realistic looking painting of a black hole was in fact an actual black hole. Fortunately, the man who tested the art out is going to be okay. He's now at home, recovering from a back injury. Serena ecosystems couldn't work

with 400 different artists, but they could work with one. Kapoor was the perfect choice. They signed a contract with Kapoor, stating he would be the first and only artist who would get to work with Vanta Black. Serena ecosystems already had all sorts of exclusive licenses with contractors in the defense and space industries.

So they figured an artist license wouldn't be that different. It's not implausible that Serene nanosystems thought that the deal was the same as any other deal that they would make with anybody else who wanted to use one of the things that they made, that nobody else in the world could make. That's not crazy, but it did have consequences. with anybody else who wanted to use one of the things that they made, that nobody else in the world could make. That's not crazy, but it did have consequences. Consequences that rocked the art world. We had expected when we announced it was exclusive, that it would limit the amount of requests we were getting

because the administration staff within the company was simply bombarded and overloaded with requests from the art world. Did that actually happen after this relationship was announced? Sadly not. Once again, people were freaking out over Vanta Black, but for very different reason this time. At first, people thought that somehow Anishikapur had the exclusive license to the color black, which was obviously not true. And that created a far storm of hatred, and I think back to that time we were getting

hate mail, death threats, all kinds of crazy stuff. You know what the internet's like. Vanta Black is a nanotechnology that can only be achieved using serene nanosystems, proprietary reactor and trained technicians. It is not a color, it's a technology. They didn't patent a shade of black that absorbs 99.95% of light. They patented a unique process and material that absorbed 99.95% of light. Still, a lot of people thought that technology was beside the point. So we're talking about ownership of no light.

So how can someone own no light? This is Stuart's simple and artist based in Bournemouth in the UK. I understood quite quickly how elaborate it was to use the stuff, but that didn't change how I felt about this exclusive arrangement that had hatched. Initially, Stuart was really excited when he first heard about Vanta Black, even though he wasn't sure what he would make with it. I wasn't really thinking about how I'd use it. I mean, I was initially just in awe at the stuff itself.

I hadn't really got ideas because by the time I'd had a chance to hatch an idea for it, it turned out that Inesh Kapoor had the rights to it and everything else. Stuart actually doesn't blame Serenano systems for choosing to work with Anishikapur. They came from the world of tech and had a completely different mindset. The object of his frustration was Anishikapur. Stuart thinks morally, as an artist, Kapur should have known better than to try to keep Vanta Black exclusively for himself. Historically and presently, so much of art has been dependent on new technology.

From oil paints, to photography, to video, art evolves with whatever is technologically possible. So the fact that this new material was purposefully being withheld from the rest of the artistic community ruffled a lot of feathers, including storage symbols. It just smacked of complete art world elitism and the power to dominate things if you've got money and and stature. Although Ben Jensen from Serenano Systems is quick to point out that artists being protective of technology isn't actually a new thing in the art world.

Artists have been creating their own oil paints since the Renaissance, and they were under no artists being protective of technology isn't actually a new thing in the art world. Artists have been creating their own oil paint since the Renaissance, and they were under no obligation to share their material with their competitors. Today, people feel, if something exists, they have an automatic right to it. So because we created this material, everybody has an automatic right to it, the reality is the world has never been like that. You go back to when Turner was creating his blacks and you go up to him and say, hey, you created an amazing black eye wanted it.

You would have been laughed out of the artsy. But simple sees it a different way. Regardless of what Renaissance artists did, he believes that sharing knowledge and technology can only move the arts community forward. Which is why he actually felt a little hypocritical. Stort had been mixing his own paints and pigments for years to use in his own artwork, and he realized he wasn't practicing what he preached, sharing. I was no better than him because I'd been making these awesome colors and just using them

for myself. I'd been hoarding them for my own work. I wasn't sharing them. Stort had a bunch of pigments that he created himself. The green is green, the pinkest pink, the glitteriest glitter, you get the idea. And it occurred to him that he could kill two birds with one stone. He could share his colors with his artistic peers and poke a little fun at a niche capore's exclusive license to Vanta Black. So I thought what I'll do is I'll share my pinkist pink that I made with the whole world

and put it on the internet as a joke as a piece of performance art if you like to use the internet as a space for debate and dialogue. With one caveat, everyone in the world could use this new color except an Iskapur. I would ban Anish Kapoor from using my pink. Stewart put one of his colors, the pinkest pink, up for sale on his website with a very specific purchasing agreement. So to buy the pinkest pink,

you have to agree to legal terms and conditions on the website when you add it to your car. And they are that you're not an Ish Kapoor, you're in no way associated, you're affiliated to an Ish Kapoor, and the best of your knowledge, information, and belief, the paint won't make its way into the hands of anish Kapoor.

The move was part joke, part performance art. He figured a few of his friends would buy some and they'd have a good laugh about it. But he ended up selling tens of thousands of jars of the pinkest pink, each one a tiny middle finger to Kapoor. And things escalated quickly from there. Kapoor comes back, posts a picture of him giving the middle finger to the camera with his

finger coated in this pink, in Samples pink. Adam Rogers again. Anish Kapoor had somehow managed to get around Stewart's Ironclad user agreement and posted a picture to his Instagram account of his actual middle finger covered in the pinkest pink. So this is like a teenager's fighting, right? Like they're having a fight on social media. I didn't think it was actually anish kupou,

so I just thought it was someone having a joke. But then when I realized it was him, I was like, oh my God, that's really, really bad. It was bad, but it was also kind of good for Stuart. He got one of the most prominent artists in the industry to publicly flip him the bird. And now he had the internet on his side. The rest of the artistic community in thousands and thousands of comments was like,

if you write back, buddy. Commenters piled on Nuanish Kapoor's Instagram post, telling him to hashtag Share the Black. Stewart suddenly found himself with an army of open-source art defenders behind him, and he was right at a mount a full-scale attack. And Stort, it's like captured that vibe, but he thought, well, okay, if that's the way it's gonna be, I'm gonna make a better black. So we decided to beat Kapoor at his own game

and create a super black paint that could rival Vanta Black. It took years of development and multiple iterations and entire community of crowdsourced artist feedback to develop the formula for something that he calls Black3. Growing in the cosmetics industry, we used what we call mattifiers. So we borrowed some of that technology and then we reformulated the binder to make it really open

and really white. So we could cram loads later this black pigment in there, which makes this really super black, almost like Valver thing. Black 3 doesn't trap as much light as Vanta Black, but it's still pretty dark. You can imagine what it's like in the justice league to stand next to Super Red.

Oh, no, you don't have that many. But I have some Super Redress still. You're still very strong. Yeah, you're still very strong, exactly. Black 3 is like Aquaman. It's fine. I have some superpowers that still... You're still very strong. Yeah, you're still very strong, exactly. Black 3 is like Aquaman. It's fine. Stuart made sure it was an acrylic paint because any painter would be able to easily work with it.

It's also affordable so that artists can actually buy it. And lastly... You can't buy Black 3 if you're an Isch Kapoor, if you're associated with an Isch Kapoor, or to the best of your knowledge, information, belief it's going to make it's way into the hands of an Isch Kapoor, if you're associated with Anish Kapoor, or to the best of your knowledge information and belief it's going to make it's way into the hands of Anish Kapoor. Anish Kapoor wouldn't be painting with black three anytime soon, but it turns out neither woods do or simple.

Do you know it's too black for my work. I can't use it. It's too black. The minute you put it on a painting, it just dominates everything. After all the feuding, research and development and sheer painstaking work that went into creating one of the world's blackest blacks, Stewart doesn't use it. And oddly enough, Anishikapur, the person who set off this whole controversy in the first place, hasn't used his blackest black very much either. A few years back, he released a limited edition $98,000 Vanta Black watch, but that's about it.

Neither simple nor capore had much use in having the darkest pigment in the world, but there was one artist who actually did. Hello? Hi, this is Demote. That's me, hello, so nice to talk to you. Demote Strib works at the intersection of art and science. And recently, she came out of nowhere with a black pigment that rendered the entire

feud between Kapoor and Semple pretty much meaningless. And the best part is, she didn't even mean to. My artwork in this setting really triggered a scientific discovery, which is unusual in these times. Usually artistic work would not trigger a scientific paper, but in this case it was, it really came out of the arts and I thought this was really cool. In 2019, Stree released a work called The Redemption of Vanity, in which she coded a $2 million dollar in a new nanotube material developed with MIT's next lab. It's a critique of material value because the diamond's value is visually speaking, reduced to nothing.

Diamond and carbon nanotubes are two forms of carbon atoms in a different order. That means that you have the most brightest material, and the most blackest material, basically generated from the same element. This new carbon nanotube material created for stream actually unseeded Vanta Black as the new blackest material in the world. It traps an astronomical 99.995 percent of light as comparative Vanta Blacks 99.955 percent%. Which is ironic because the only reason she developed a blacker black than a niche Kapoor's is because of a niche Kapoor. Had it not been for the exclusive license with Kapoor, MIT and Strebes' new record-breaking

material might not exist by choosing not to work with other artists. Surinanos unintentionally inspired a rival super black material that beat their record. But Streep says she wasn't trying to one up Surrey Nanosystems or make a statement to Anish Kapoor. Everything she was just trying to move past the bickering and create art. I like art to be free and speak through its conceptual powers and aesthetics. I do not, I'm not interested in raising the moral fingertip to Anish Kapoor or anybody else.

Anish Kapoor still has the exclusive rights to use Vanta Black in his artwork, and it's unclear whether he's planning on releasing any future pieces using the material. Actually, his most recent exhibition couldn't be any further away from Black. It's a series of mirrored sculptures that are almost impossibly reflective. These days, Stewart Simple has a new giant to Sla. He's taken on T-Mobile. The company has been sending cease-and-assists to small businesses using a similar shade to their trademark pink. So in protest, he's released a new pigment that he calls pink TM. It's an exact color match to T-Mobile's and it's available to anyone,

unless they're in any way affiliated with T-Mobile. Ben Jensen is still at Serenano Systems, developing newer iterations of Vanta Black that are not exclusive to any artist. But he seemed a little hesitant to work with artists again. He seems pretty content to return to his humble childhood ambitions of blasting super-acor things into space. Personally, I love the space business. I just absolutely love it. Like I said, I started as a young kid trying to build space rockets. And today we have materials that we create orbiting the earth. And I cannot tell you how that makes me feel. You know, this little kid that was looking at the moon on dark nights and thought,

I want to send something up to space to today, we actually send stuff into space. As for the black that came out of MIT, D-Moodstreeb knows that this isn't going to be the end-all be-all for the world's darkest pigment. Another material will eventually come along and end their reign as the blackest black, but what's important to Striben Next Lab isn't that their material is the darkest, but that it's available to the rest of the art world. So for now, the blackest black is open to any artist to use, including Anishikapur. What's the opposite of Vant Black? Vant White.

Actually, that's not the answer. But we do have a story about a color pigment that is so desirable, it was at the center of a case of economic espionage. Adam Rogers comes back to tell me that story after the break. One of the big takeaways of the Vanta Black story is that there is color all around us, but we don't really put a lot of thought into the process of creating it. Journalist Adam Rogers, who we heard from in the Vantablack story, and who was writing a whole book about colors, came into the studio to talk to me about the technology behind

another pigment that was so sought after that it was at the center of an FBI investigation. You may not have heard of it before, but Jesus is, you haven't gone a day, maybe, haven't even gone an hour, without coming into contact with it. It is titanium dioxide. The coolest thing about titanium dioxide is that everyone interacts with it all the time. Yeah. Because it is, primarily, it's the thing

that makes almost every human-made thing white. White, if you see what I mean. Yeah, yeah. It'll confer an almost platonic principle of whiteness to do things. It'll convey opacity and brightness as well. So you find it in other colors, other pigment, house paints, it'll be like 40%.

Titanium dioxide, no matter what color they are, even if they're red. But titanium dioxide's in a bunch of different colors, as well as being like in a tube of titanium white oil paint that you would buy if you get the real stuff There was a story that it may be apocryphal The during the Cold War the West had more access to titanium dioxide than Russia block affiliated so you were supposed to be able to see one of the reasons that the like behind the Berlin Wall things look kind of dingy and

dim and not as saturated was that their paints, as they got old, they would show through more. They didn't have as much titanium dioxide. They weren't using titanium dioxide, but the west was. So when you would walk through the Brandenburg Gate and the west would be all bright and beautiful and there was more color, it was because of that. That may be apocryl, but I love the story so much that it works for me. And it's even in food, right? Yeah, a lot of food. Especially the things like Oreo filling, I think they don't use it anymore. Something like a like a life saver or like sprinkles on cupcakes. Very lot. It of titanium dioxide in those pharmaceuticals,

pills, like almost every pill if you have pills in your medicine cabinet, a lot of it in that, shaving cream for sure, shaving cream is a big one. Porcelains, the things that are in, if you walk around your kitchen in your bathroom, a lot of those surfaces and a lot of the small objects are, you will see TI-02 on that ingredient level. How is titanium dioxide discovered? Well, titanium was actually discovered that they element very common.

Nights most common element in the Earth's crust discovered in a in the leat of a mill that's the little the stream that you sort of cut the side channel from a river to go through a mill nobody knew what to do with it nobody knew what it was for but in the late 1800s an engineer named AJ Rossi was playing with it because he had encountered it trying to make steel from the iron bearing ores of the Adirondacks. Nobody knew if you could use it to make that steel better. He started a company that thought he could, and to do it, he needed a lot of power to make the furnace as hot enough to make this work.

So he went to what was sort of the Silicon Valley of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which was Niagara Falls. Because of all the power. Because of all the power. Right. Okay. So the hydroelectric power. Right.

So he was doing electrochemistry. Oh, cool. And this is the place where like union carbides started. If you wanted to do this weird, alchemical, magical chemistry that needed a lot of power, you could crack open minerals, crack open ores and mix them together in new, weird ways. So there were all these companies that started up in Niagara Falls. His was one of them. But at one point in the process, one of the byproducts of the process was titanium dioxide would

precipitate out as this beautiful bright white powder. And Rossi was smart enough to know that there was a huge demand at that moment for something to replace. What was the classic, brightener, opacifier, and white pigment since antiquity, which was lead. There was some discover, the shortcomings of lead. Yes. But he sees this white.

He sees the white. And he goes, I know what this could do, potentially. And he mixes it with salad oil. Okay. And he runs his finger across it, puts his finger in it, runs it across a piece of paper. It's this beautiful white. And he says, aha, we. Okay. And he runs his finger across it, puts his finger in it, runs it across a piece of paper. It's this beautiful white and he says, aha, we got it. We got it.

And he starts a company, gets sort of suspended by World War I, but once that's over, he's the only kind of town, then our region's come up with a process too. And now there's this way to make titanium dioxide, and it becomes ubiquitous in human industry. How big of an industry is titanium dioxide? It varies, but I think right now it's like a $4 billion a year industry and I forget the amounts. It's some hundreds of two T.E.U. cargo units a year.

But that doesn't seem like a lot if you know, know how much cash Apple has on hand or something. But it's, it minutes a amount of it or in everything that we touch every day. Almost everything that we touch every day. And so to me that makes it one of those invisible pieces of things that we touch that makes the world look the way it does.

Since it was discovered there have been these various methods to make it. Tell me about that. The process that Rossi figured out, and the one that was in place really until kind of around, a little before World War II, it was called the sulfide process, it's really gross, it's really dirty, requires sulfuric acid, and it requires a fairly pure ore to turn into titanium dioxide, and it's not very efficient. So in the 30s, a chemist named Paul Kubelka figured out a way to use hydrochloric acid.

So the chloride process was born, a complicated industrial process that uses really big factories that you know look like steam punk kind of star destroyers. They're fantastic. I got to miss it when they're amazing. He figures that out. That process becomes the de facto. You can use kind of dirtier ores, and it's more efficient. It's a better way to make the stuff. And through various waves of acquisitions and purchases,

this becomes the property of DuPont. So DuPont becomes the main purveyor of chloride process, titanium dioxide for the world, essentially, and that becomes sort of a de facto standard. So there's continual evolution of how to make better and cleaner titanium dioxide. And this eventually leads to a big intellectual property case. So tell me about that and how that got started. So in like the mid 2000s, DuPont goes to the FBI and says, listen, we're pretty sure somebody

has stolen our chloride process for making titanium dioxide. We're pretty sure we know who, we're pretty sure we know who he's selling it to. And the FBI, which has just started, not by coincidence, an economic espionage office in Silicon Valley, because Congress has just passed the first economic espionage act, essentially because they are worried about the same thing Dupont is, which is that China is trying to take IP from American companies. I see. China is trying to take IP from American companies. Nice see, okay. So DuPont goes to the FBI and says,

we are pretty sure that this dude named Walter Liu is selling our chloride process for building factories for making or into titanium dioxide to the Chinese government. And how did Walter Liu get his hands on the DuPont method? Walter Liu, according to later trial documents, this foil that a little bit, so found his way to a state dinner in China,

where he had kind of promised that he knew how to make stuff that was on a literal list that the Chinese government had said, gosh, we'd sure like it. If somebody could teach us how to do this stuff for Chinese industrial reasons. Okay. That'd be great. And they kind of showed him the list. And he was like, yeah, totally can make you guys titanium dioxide with his buddy sort of nudging go like, Walter, we don't know how to make titanium dioxide. It's like, it's fine. We're good. It's fine. And

what Lou eventually ended up doing with the FBI eventually understood, Lou to end up doing was finding a couple of, this is more disrespectful than I mean to say, but essentially finding a couple of disgruntled X-Dupont employees, engineers who had helped develop and deploy the chloride process factories that DuPont could build in the US and other countries,

who had left the company unhappy and with their boxes of stuff. deploy the chloride process factories that DuPont could build in the US and in other countries, who had left the company unhappy and with their boxes of stuff. And with those, he kind of lose started in the mission. It's just go start at a little storefront office where he like processed that information and sold it to the Chinese. How does DuPont figure this out? And then how does the FBI start to stitch together the case? DuPont was cagey with how they figured it out.

Even with the FBI, or the FBI was cagey with me about how DuPont had told them, they figured DuPont has its own internal security. They're very worried about this kind of stuff. But they found out somehow, and they said to the FBI, we think it's this guy. The FBI started surveillance and looked into both the people who Lou was working with on the East Coast and Delaware, his office here, and eventually got enough evidence to say we are pretty sure that he's the guy. And we're pretty sure that he's about to have a meeting with his Chinese contacts

Well, I'm a given day. Okay, and we're pretty sure that they're staying in a crummy hotel in Alameda And they in conjunction with a relatively new US attorney in San Francisco who really wanted to get some action out of this office Figured out how to mount a bi-coastal, multi-place exercise search warrants on everybody all at once, hundreds of agents deployed. And I mean, so this is a huge, is this the first case that's sort of executed in the S.P. knowledge act? It was the first case prosecutor under the economic S.P. knowledge act. And then, so was the first, it was the first guy's prosecutor and under the economic Espionage Act. Yeah. And then so what is, what ended up, what was the result?

What's he convicted? He was convicted and is still in prison. They never found the money. The money that the Chinese government turned out, had paid Walter and his family. And China has an active core ed process, titanium dioxide processing business out, because they had this kind of crummy

or grumpy or or and no way to make it into titanium dioxide. And now they do. Because of Walter Lou. Perhaps, perhaps. Or maybe they figured it out on the road. Maybe. And yes, for a pigment, for a color. To be able to make a color.

And I just love the whole premise of both of Antoblack story and this story, what I love about it is the idea of color as technology. Like that is a very, I think that's a strange notion to people. I think it's a strange notion too, but let me, let me yes and you. It's always been technology. Sure. There's this, there's the experience that a living thing will have of a colored world, a world of color, because a lot of the things that are alive on the

planet have ways of interacting with the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum that include the part of it that we call visible because for us it's the visible part. But there's a moment in human history where we take probably iron ore, it's probably ochre, right? Take this rock, crunch it up, mix it with trebecular fat from some animals back bone and smear it on a k-wall or smear it on a thing that we make, not just to protect it against mosquitoes, which is possibly a thing that it does, not just to glue together the half-defin axe, which is another thing that maybe Yoker, you know, pulp does, to make a design to evoke something. Right. Probably red, although it might have been black,

and it might have been white. White's the thing that doesn't last as long as others are so hard to know. And at that moment, like, our interaction with the colored universe becomes a one-up technique as well, it becomes a technological interaction. 99% of visible was produced this week by Vivian Le. Mixed in tech production by Sherefusif, music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colestad, is the first to be released this week by Vivian Le. Mix and Tech Production by Srivthusif, Mutak by Sean Riyal. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the team is Emmet Fitzgerald,

Avery Trollman, Joe Rosenberg, Delaney Hall, Chris Barube, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Adam Rogers when his book, About Color Comes Out, we will shout it from the rooftops. In the meantime, you can read his stories about science and miscellaneous geekery at Wired. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in Beautiful, Downtown,

Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radtopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. If you want to see a video of people freaking out when they see Vandablaq for the first

time, you should go to 99ipi.org. Thank you very much.