E Ink

E Ink (electronic ink) is a paper-like display technology, characterized by high brightness and contrast, a wide viewing angle, and ultra-low power requirements. The technology has been commercialized by the E Ink Corporation, which was co-founded in 1997 by MIT undergraduates J.D. Albert & Barrett Comiskey, MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson, Jerome Rubin and Russ Wilcox.

It is currently available commercially in grayscale and color and is commonly used in mobile devices such as e-readers, and, to a lesser extent, digital signage, mobile phones, smartwatches, electronic shelf labels and architecture panels.

The notion of a low-power paper-like display had existed since the 1970s, originally conceived by researchers at Xerox PARC, but had never been realized. While a post-doctoral student at Stanford university, physicist Joseph Jacobson envisioned a multi-page book with content that could be changed at the push of a button and required little power to use.

Neil Gershenfeld brought in Jacobson to the MIT Media Lab in 1995 after hearing his ideas for an electronic book. Jacobson, in turn, recruited MIT undergrads Barrett Comiskey, a math major, and J.D. Albert, a mechanical engineering major, to create the display technology required to realize his vision.

The initial approach was to create tiny spheres which were half white and half black, and which, depending on the electric charge, would rotate such that the white side or the black side would be visible on the display. Albert and Comiskey were told this approach was impossible by most experienced chemists and materials scientists and they had trouble creating these perfectly half-white, half-black spheres, and during his experiments, Albert accidentally created some all-white spheres.

Comiskey experimented with charging and encapsulating those all-white particles in microcapsules mixed in with a dark dye. The result was a system of microcapsules which could be applied to a surface and then could be charged independently to create black and white images. A first patent was filed for this microencapsulated electrophoretic display by MIT in October 1996.

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