The story
Founded by Joseph M. Jacobson in 1997.1
Background
The notion of a low-power paper-like display had existed since the 1970s, originally conceived by researchers at Xerox PARC but had never been realized. While a post-doctoral student at Stanford University, physicist Joseph Jacobson envisioned a multi-page book with content that could be changed at the push of a button and required little power to use.
Neil Gershenfeld recruited Jacobson for the MIT Media Lab in 1995, after hearing Jacobson's ideas for an electronic book. Jacobson, in turn, recruited MIT undergrads Barrett Comiskey, a math major, and J.D. Albert, a mechanical engineering major, to create the display technology required to realize his vision.
Product development
The initial approach was to create tiny spheres which were half white and half black, and which, depending on the electric charge, would rotate such that the white side or the black side would be visible on the display. Albert and Comiskey were told this approach was impossible by most experienced chemists and materials scientists and had trouble creating these perfectly half-white, half-black spheres.
Comiskey experimented with charging and encapsulating those all-white particles in microcapsules mixed in with a dark dye. The result was a system of microcapsules that could be applied to a surface and could then be charged independently to create black and white images. A first patent was filed by MIT for the microencapsulated electrophoretic display in October 1996.
The scientific paper was featured on the cover of Nature, something extremely unusual for work done by undergraduates. The advantage of the microencapsulated electrophoretic display and its potential for satisfying the practical requirements of electronic paper were summarized in the abstract of the Nature paper:
It has for many years been an ambition of researchers in display media to create a flexible low-cost system that is the electronic analogue of paper... viewing characteristic[s] result in an "ink on paper" look. But such displays have to date suffered from short lifetimes and difficulty in manufacture. Here we report the synthesis of an electrophoretic ink based on the microencapsulation of an electrophoretic dispersion. The use of a microencapsulated electrophoretic medium solves the lifetime issues and permits the fabrication of a bistable electronic display solely by means of printing. This system may satisfy the practical requirements of electronic paper.
A second patent was filed by MIT for the microencapsulated electrophoretic display in March 1997.
Subsequently, Albert, Comiskey and Jacobson along with Russ Wilcox and Jerome Rubin founded the E Ink Corporation in 1997, two months prior to Albert and Comiskey's graduation from MIT.
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Company history
E Ink Corporation (or simply "E Ink") is a subsidiary of E Ink Holdings (EIH), a Taiwanese Holding Company (8069.TWO) manufacturer. They are the manufacturer and distributor of electrophoretic displays, a kind of electronic paper, that they market under the name E Ink. E Ink Corporation is headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts. The company was co-founded in 1997 by Albert and Comiskey, along with Joseph Jacobson (professor in the MIT Media Lab), Jerome Rubin (LexisNexis co-founder), and Russ Wilcox. Two years later, E Ink partnered with Philips to develop and market the technology. Jacobson and Comiskey are listed as inventors on the original patent filed in 1996. Albert, Comiskey, and Jacobsen were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2016. In 2005, Philips sold the electronic paper business as well as its related patents to one of its primary business partners, Prime View International (PVI), a Hsinchu, Taiwan-based manufacturer.
At the E Ink Corporation, Comiskey led the development effort for E Ink's first generation of electronic ink, while Albert developed the manufacturing methods used to make electronic ink displays in high volumes. Wilcox played a variety of business roles and served as CEO from 2004 to 2009.
Acquisition
On June 1, 2008, E Ink Corp. announced an initial agreement to be purchased by PVI (Prime View International, as seen from Company History) for $215 million, an amount that eventually reached US$450 million following negotiations. E Ink was officially acquired on December 24, 2009. The purchase by PVI magnified the scale of production for the E Ink e-paper display, since Prime View also owned BOE Hydis Technology Co., Ltd and maintained a strategic partner relationship with Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corp. (now Chimei InnoLux Corporation, part of the Hon Hai-Foxconn Group). Foxconn is the sole ODM partner for Prime View's Netronix Inc., the supplier of E Ink panel e-readers, but the end-use products appear in various guises, e.g., as Bookeen, COOL-ER, PocketBook, etc.
PVI renamed itself E Ink Holdings Inc. after the purchase. In December 2012, E Ink acquired SiPix, a rival electrophoretic display company.
From Wikipedia’s article on E Ink Corporation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3