For the last century, technology has blossomed in an age of plastics. We drive cars with plastic parts, we wear eyeglasses with plastic lenses, and we sip mineral water from plastic bottles. Plastic cell phones connect us to family and friends, and plastic keys typed these very words. Plastics may now be entering additional avenues of technological greatness based on one of their newer properties–electrical conductance.
First discovered in the 1970s, conducting polymers have made it into a few small-scale commercial applications, such as antistatic coatings on photographic film and light emitting diodes in a display of maintenance information on an electric razor.