What do you do when you are 67 and wheel chair bound?  Why you invent a stealth paint that will hide objects painted with it, from radar.  Or at least that was the aim of one such German named Nickel.

Nickel wanted to invent a paint that would shield tanks, jeeps, ships and planes in much the same way as Stealth spy planes.  He began with a name for his new paint:  AR 1.  He spent hours in the desert creating various different paint mixtures without much in the way of a laboratory.   He mixed different formulas until he found one that he felt would work as envisioned.

Then he sent a can of his AR 1 to Helmut Essen, a physicist who heads the Radar Technology Department at the Research Establishment for Applied Science (FGAN) near Bonn.  Essen tested Nickel’s paint and was surprised to find that it actually performed as Nickel had planned.  When a car, building, or boat are painted with AR 1, it doesn’t show up on radar screens.  Essen is not sure why this happens.  It could be because the paint reflects radar waves in such a way that they “cancel each other out”.  The paint also contains minute magnetic particles which might also be the answer to the paints unique qualities.

What ever the reason for the paints effectiveness, it works as Nickel intended.  At 67 and without proper laboratory resources, he created a paint that will make items painted with it invisible to radar. 

Now if it comes in different colors, it might sell very well to automobile makers or painters.  The loss to state coffers from a lack of speeding tickets could be substantial.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 11:21 pm under Science and technology.

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