Anti-Reflection Coating

Katharine Blodgett at General Electric, working with Irving Langmuir, learned to build soap-like films one molecule-thick layer at a time. Stacking just enough layers onto glass, she made it nearly invisible: light reflected from the top of the film and from the glass beneath cancelled out. **US 2,220,861**, "Reduction of surface reflection", Blodgett, assigned to General Electric, filed 16. June 1938, granted 5. November 1940: a coating whose "optical thickness … corresponds at least approximately to a quarter wave length of visible light" and whose refractive index is "intermediate" between air and the glass. **You measure the reflection a coating removes**, design one in a notebook, and watch quarter-wave interference happen in a soap film.