Jump to content
The Inquirer-Home

Erasable paper created

Vanishing point
Monday, 5 May 2008, 13:00

XEROX boffins have emerged from their smoke-filled labs waving paper that has special ink that makes its contents vanish within 24 hours.

The innovation means that paper which would have been doomed to the rubbish bin or shredder can now be reused. This could save countless trees and the average company £70 a year for each employee, buy Xerox's calculations.

The sheets are coated with chemicals which turn white whenever they are run through a special printer or even left on a desk for 24 hours. The chemicals react to ultraviolet light, any text disappears and new text can be printed on top.

Instead of ink, the printer uses light to dump text and diagrams on a page,

Xerox said that if no one tries to doodle on the paper or make it into amusing paper animals the invention could save more than seven trillion pages a year.

Xerox think that their invention will be on punter’s desks by next year.

The invention is a sign that a paperless office is unlikely to be with us for some time. Xerox thinks that 44.5 per cent of documents are printed out to be used once and a quarter of them are put into recycling bins the same day. µ

L’Inq
The Scotsperson

Share this:

Comments
Mission Impossible

This message will self destruct in... 24 hours.

posted by : Josh, 05 May 2008 Complain about this comment
It shouldn't fly.

When your signed contract is "expired", print something more to another's liking. Some chemist needs to come up with a concoction that would convert prints to permanent prints. Brother Dominic where is thy quill pen?
Who gets the job of reloading the sloppy seconds, thirds, fourths and fifths? I blame Mission Impossible and that dodgy scientologist, Tom Cruise.

posted by : ₭arlsbad, 05 May 2008 Complain about this comment
vanishing ink?

Can we say hello to vanishing checks, contracts, and other legal documents? The best ones I every heard about was the checks written on vanishing paper. Write the check and poof in a few hours the paper is gone.

This is a very bad idea.

posted by : stancilmor, 06 May 2008 Complain about this comment
Vanishing paper

Oh wow, I remember that story about the vanishing checks from nearly 20 years ago. The news covered the story long enough to tell people how to detect the vanishing paper and then pulled everything so as not to give anybody else that idea. The checks were printed on an orange paper with oily feel. Pay with a check and at the end of the day when the checks were processed these were just gone...nothing left.

I agree vanishing ink seems like a bad idea

posted by : stancilmor, 09 January 2009 Complain about this comment
Advertisement
Subscribe to the INQ Newsletter
Sign-up for the INQBot weekly newsletter
Click here to sign up Existing user
Advertisement
INQ Poll

Christmas computer sales

Will you be buying a new computer this Christmas?