16 March 2018

Inventions in Everything: World's Brightest Flashlight and Glow-in-the-Dark Paint

Every now and again, we're amazed by the potential utility of the inventions that we come across.

Today is no different, where we have two inventions coming together that we learned about from Core77:

Remember Stuart Semple? He's the British artist who started making and selling that ultra-black paint after artist Anish Kapoor tried to have it all to himself. Now Semple has created that paint's opposite: LIT, which is made out of "the most powerful light emitting pigment on the planet."

This stuff is absolutely amazing. You can shine a light source on it, turn light source off, and the paint continues to give off light for up to 12 hours. It can also turn heat into light. And unlike regular glow-in-the-dark paint, it can be "recharged" indefinitely.

To test this stuff out, science channel The Action Lab shone the world's brightest flashlight--a 32,000-lumen model made by Imalent--onto the paint to see how it responds. If you are too impatient to listen to the scientific explanation for what's happening here, skip ahead in the video to about 3:26.

That's the kind of introduction the Inventions In Everything team lives for! Here's the video:

Now for the cool part. You can actually own both of these things today! Amazon has the Imalent DX80 "The End of Darkness" 32,000 Lumen LED Rechargeable Flashlight available for $379.95 at this writing, while Stuart Semple is selling the LIT paint pigment powder from his UK-based website for £9.99 (or $13.80 U.S. dollars at this writing, not including shipping, but click here for the latest currency conversion rates).

What would you do with these two things is something that you would have to work out for yourself, but we'd be interested in seeing the applications that people come up with!

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