In living color?

One of the facts of life that continuously dogs REFR shareholders can be summed up by a semi-famous line by Bret Spiner on Star Trek: "It is blue."

To be sure, they often try to pretend otherwise, calling the blue "cool", "soothing", or perhaps "futuristic". But all of that is shown up for the bluff it is by the rush of unbridled excitement that happens whenever the the latest rumor floats about the holy grail of SPD: the black particle.

The black particle dates back to at least 1998, when REFR issued a press release (what else?) announcing the invention of the black SPD particle. Needless to say, this got a lot of people excited. Now SPD would be able to shed the "blue stigma" and look just like other electrochromic technology. Better yet, if they could make the particles black, perhaps they could make them other colors as well. The dream of SPD computer displays might not be dead after all.

And so the vigil for the black SPD particle began. And continued. And went on some more. And so on. After all, it might take a little while to go from "invention" to practical application, but surely that transition was inevitable, right?

Perhaps not. Five years later, at the 2003 annual meeting, Robert Saxe admitted that the black particle was "not ready". And that was basically the first, and last, official word on the black particle since the "invention" announcement.

So there we have another case of "it never really panned out" from the company that seems to specialize in failing to pan out.