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Joseph Jacobson

Abstract

Joseph Jacobson (born 1965) is the MIT physicist who wanted a book whose pages could be reprinted at the push of a button and, with two undergraduates, invented the display that made the e-reader possible. The microencapsulated electrophoretic ink they patented in 1996 and published on the cover of Nature in 1998 holds its image with no power, reads by reflected light like paper, and can be printed onto a sheet. The company they founded in 1997, E Ink, burned through about $100 million on electronic shop signs and “radio paper” before its screen reached Sony’s Librié in 2004 and Amazon’s Kindle in 2007, and was sold to its Taiwanese manufacturer in 2009. Jacobson had by then moved on to printed silicon transistors and, at the Media Lab’s Molecular Machines group, to synthesizing genes.

E Ink Display Detail
An E Ink screen (an iRex iLiad reader, 2006) read outdoors in sunlight, the condition in which the display beats every backlit alternative. Image: Martouf, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Book That Changes Its Pages

Jacobson was born on June 28, 1965, in Newton, Massachusetts. He took a physics degree at Brown, a physics doctorate at MIT in 1992 (his thesis work produced the shortest laser pulse then achieved, measured in optical cycles) and spent 1992 to 1995 as a postdoctoral fellow in nonlinear quantum optics at Stanford. Nothing in that record points at publishing. The idea he later dated to 1993, and which the E Ink founding story places on a beach in the summer of 1995 after he had finished the book he had brought and wished he could press a button and have another, was a bound book of ordinary-looking pages, each of which could be rewritten. It needed a display that looked like paper, kept its image with the power off, and could be made by printing rather than by the vacuum lithography that produced liquid-crystal panels. In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte’s Media Lab, on Neil Gershenfeld’s recommendation, hired him to try.

He recruited two undergraduates, Barrett Comiskey, a mathematics major, and J. D. Albert, a mechanical engineer. The first plan copied an idea Nicholas Sheridon had had at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, Gyricon: tiny spheres, one hemisphere black and one white, which rotate under an electric field. Making millions of perfectly bicoloured spheres defeated them, and the chemists and materials scientists they consulted said it could not be done at all. Comiskey’s way round it was to give up on rotation. He charged all-white pigment particles, suspended them in a dark dye, and sealed the mixture into microcapsules; a voltage of one sign pulled the white particles to the top of the capsule, where the viewer saw white, and the other sign pushed them down out of sight behind the dye. Once moved, the particles stayed, so the display held a page with no current at all and drew power only when the page turned. Electrophoretic displays had been tried since the 1970s and had failed on lifetime, because the particles clumped and settled; confining each few in its own capsule solved that, and a slurry of capsules could be coated onto almost anything. MIT filed the first patent in October 1996 and a second in March 1997.

Microcapsules

The paper appeared in Nature on July 16, 1998, as “An electrophoretic ink for all-printed reflective electronic displays,” by Comiskey, Albert, Hidekazu Yoshizawa and Jacobson, and made the cover, which is unusual for work whose first two authors were undergraduates when they did it. Its abstract set out the claim plainly: displays that were the electronic analogue of paper had been an ambition for years, “but such displays have to date suffered from short lifetimes and difficulty in manufacture. Here we report the synthesis of an electrophoretic ink based on the microencapsulation of an electrophoretic dispersion. The use of a microencapsulated electrophoretic medium solves the lifetime issues and permits the fabrication of a bistable electronic display solely by means of printing.” A year earlier Jacobson, Comiskey, Albert and two colleagues had described the intended product in the IBM Systems Journal under the title “The last book”: a single volume, its pages coated with the ink and its spine holding the electronics, that could become any book. The patent the National Inventors Hall of Fame cites, US 6,124,851, names Jacobson and Comiskey as inventors. On the mechanism and its application see The History of Displays.

E Ink Corporation

E Ink Corporation was founded in Cambridge in 1997, two months before Albert and Comiskey graduated, by the three of them with Russ Wilcox, who handled the business side, and Jerome Rubin, a co-founder of LexisNexis. Comiskey led the first generation of the ink; Albert worked out how to manufacture it in volume. The company raised about $100 million in its first years from Atlas Venture, Solstice Capital, Hearst, the advertising group Interpublic and Motorola, on a business plan that described an $80 billion opportunity in “radio paper,” updatable signs and pages fed by wireless. The first product, Immedia, launched in May 1999, was a large in-store sign; J.C. Penney was the first customer and took 140 of them, for $150,000 in sales. Philips invested $7.5 million in February 2001 for the rights to use the ink in handheld displays, and Toppan Printing in Japan signed on for colour filters. A watchmaker placed a $1.5 million order.

By 2003 the money was gone and neither the watch nor the display promised to Sony had shipped. In January 2004 the chief executive, James Iuliano, told the board the company would run out of cash before it could fix the remaining defects; the board replaced him with Wilcox, then 36, who raised $50 million and laid off half the senior staff. In April 2004 Sony approved the display for mass production, and its Librié, built with Philips and Toppan, went on sale in Japan that month as the first consumer product with an electronic-paper screen. The reader itself failed on the terms attached to its books (see Project Gutenberg and the E-Book and Sony); the screen did not. E Ink’s revenue went from nothing to just under $4 million in 2005, the year Philips sold its electronic-paper business and patents to its manufacturing partner Prime View International (PVI) of Hsinchu, Taiwan. In November 2007 Amazon shipped the Kindle with an E Ink screen, and Wilcox said it was the first time “radio paper” had been tested commercially. By 2008 revenue was $15 million, more than half of it from e-reader makers, and Esquire’s October 2008 issue carried the first magazine cover with E Ink in it. Successive generations of the film, Vizplex (2007), Pearl (2010) and Carta (2013), raised contrast and refresh speed; Kaleido added colour at reduced resolution, and the multi-pigment Advanced Color ePaper shipped for retail signage in late 2018.

In June 2009, with some three million e-readers forecast to sell that year and the company at 127 employees, PVI agreed to buy E Ink for $215 million; by the time the deal closed on December 24, 2009, the price had reached about $450 million. PVI renamed itself E Ink Holdings, bought the rival SiPix in December 2012, and remains the dominant maker of the electrophoretic screens in readers, shelf labels and station timetables. Jacobson, Albert and Comiskey were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2016.

Dead End: Radio Paper

The founders’ plan was never e-readers. The $80 billion figure was for signage and updatable print, “radio paper,” which is where the first $100 million went, and the in-store sign business shrank to small point-of-purchase cards within a few years. Wilcox counted 700 possible applications; the one that paid was the one the founders had treated as a demonstration, a page of static text that changed a few times an hour. E Ink’s weaknesses, slow refresh, no backlight, poor colour, are exactly what a book does not need, and its two strengths, weeks of battery life and legibility in sunlight, are what a book cannot do without. Where those trade-offs did not hold, the product lost: the Pixel Qi dual-mode screen that Mary Lou Jepsen built for One Laptop per Child (Jacobson was a founding director of the project) tried to give a laptop the same sunlight readability and found too few buyers to survive, and colour electrophoretic panels have stayed a niche behind LCD and OLED. The investors’ exit at $450 million on some $150 million put in was respectable; the company that changed reading did not get rich doing it.

Printed Silicon and Synthetic DNA

Jacobson’s next company applied the same premise, that electronics should be printed, to the transistor itself. Nanotectonica, founded in 2001 with Media Lab colleagues Colin Bulthaup, Brian Hubert and Brent Ridley and later renamed Kovio, developed a silicon ink that could be laid down by graphics-printing processes to make thin-film circuits cheap enough for RFID tags on individual items. It showed what it described as the first commercially viable printed silicon transistor in 2007, raised more than $100 million from Kleiner Perkins, DAG Ventures and Flagship among others, and sold NFC tags; on January 21, 2014, the Norwegian firm Thin Film Electronics bought its technology, patents and production equipment, and Kovio ceased to exist as a company.

At MIT he heads the Molecular Machines group and was a founding member of the Center for Bits and Atoms. The group’s work moved from ink to biology: error-correcting methods for synthesizing genes, recoded organisms for making non-natural proteins, and machine learning coupled to high-throughput synthesis for protein and small-molecule design. In 2009 he co-founded Gen9 with George Church of Harvard and Drew Endy of Stanford to manufacture synthetic DNA at scale; Ginkgo Bioworks bought it on January 20, 2017. He holds 115 United States patents, was named to Technology Review’s first TR100 in 1999, and received the Gutenberg Prize of the city of Mainz in 2000, a Discover award in 2001 and the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 2013. His summary of the E Ink years, given at his Hall of Fame induction, was about persistence rather than physics: “Your ability and willingness and desire to step over obstacles is the single most important ingredient for eventually getting across the finish line.”

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