Anti Reflective Coatings – A Brief History
British physicist and winner of the 1904 Nobel Prize for Physics Lord Rayleigh (3rd Baron Rayleigh John William Strutt) discovered the first, simplest kind of AR coating in 1886, when tests he performed on tarnished old glass (at the time, chemical reactions between optical glass and the surrounding environment cause surfaces to tarnish) revealed – much to his surprise – that more light was transmitted by these tarnished pieces than by untarnished new glass.
