This jade green goblet looks red when lit from behind.
The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus
Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears
jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a
property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired
the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when
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.
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