IN THE 1960S LIQUID CRYSTALS HIT THE MEDIA AS THE STUFF OF sci-fi futuristic fantasy, a magical type of chemical that would oon be able to see through the human body and bring to life Dick Tracy’s TV wristwatch or a television set you could roll up like a magazine and stuff into your back pocket. Then in the 1970s came the Mood Ring, color-changing jewelry that could supposedly reveal your true emotions and help guide your love life. There were serious innovations by scientists in industry, medicine, and academia too—and they also had a tint of unreality about them. The public saw numbers flashing and disappearing on wafer-thin screens, bodies painted black and turning colors in medical labs, and plates of clear plastic turning green and blue at the presence of dangerous gases.

Forty years later liquid crystals are everywhere around us, and we take them for granted. When you glance at your digital watch, you’re looking at liquid crystals. Or when you read the thermometer in your fish tank, write an e-mail on your laptop, consult your Palm Pilot, or set your microwave or coffeepot, and probably when you look at the speedometer on your dashboard. Liquid crystals may be in every room in your house; they are used in tens of thousands of high-tech consumer and industrial products, adding up to a multi-billion-dollar industry that turns out new applications every day. Yet not so long ago scientists dismissed them as a laboratory curiosity.

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