Names are important; anyone who has had to name a child knows this very well. This is also true when it comes to the names of products: every great product deserves a memorable name! Today, we introduce a new brand name for DexMat's aligned carbon nanotube fibers, yarns, and films: Galvorn.
When choosing a name, we often look at two things: inspirational examples, and desirable traits. Here Luigi Galvani meets J. R. R. Tolkien to give us the perfect name for our material.
One of the most exciting aspects of our aligned carbon nanotube materials is that they combine the electrical conductivity of metals with the light weight, strength, and flexibility of polymer fibers or textile thread. Our materials also have very high surface area, and hence makes great electrical contact with our skin and tissue, rendering them ideal for use in wearable electronics or electrophysiology. We wanted a name that would do justice to this combination of properties.
One of us is from Bologna, the city where Luigi Galvani was born and did his work. Galvani is known for discovering that he could induce dead frog’s legs to twitch by stimulating them with metal electrodes. This makes Galvani the father of electrophysiology; several scientific effects, instruments, and devices have been named for him, such as galvanic current, the galvanometer, and the galvanic cell. So, we knew that we wanted to include an homage to Galvani in our product name, to reflect the conductivity of our materials and their usefulness as electrodes.
However, Galvani did not work with strong, flexible materials: therefore, we needed to look beyond him for further naming inspiration that might evoke these properties. Fortunately, we are engineers steeped in nerd culture, and we found a perfect fit in the text of The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien. In one of the stories contained in this prequel to The Lord of The Rings, a skilled elven smith by the name of Eöl creates a new type of metal called galvorn that is described as being thin and flexible, yet also strong enough to serve as armor. Eöl wears this light and flexible metal as his clothing. The visual description of galvorn fits that of our carbon nanotube materials nearly perfectly; it is described as being “black and shining like jet”. Digging a little deeper, one finds that the etymology of the word itself is based on this visual description: in Tolkien's constructed elven language, gal- is a root word meaning ‘shine’ and -vorn (or -morn) is a suffix meaning ‘black’. Serendipitously, the name Galvorn evokes both this fantastic metal and the name of Galvani!
We don’t think we could have found a more fitting trade name for our high-performance aligned carbon nanotube products. We may not be powerful elven smiths who learned the secrets of metalworking from dwarves in the First Age of Arda, but we are proud of the materials we are producing and developing at DexMat — and some have called us “wizards of nanotechnology” for what we have been able to do so far. We are sure that our Galvorn will be worthy of its name, and we won’t let it become another lost secret!
As an added bonus, we are excited to have found a name derived from Tolkien’s canon that has not already been trademarked by Peter Thiel.