In a Flash of Light

Marking. Branding a sign to identify an object, declare who made it, make it unique and unmistakable, guarantee its quality… So great is the power of "name" in our culture, that if this gesture was not born together with craft, it surely cannot be much younger anyway. And thus, from the first signs carved by a potter in the clay of his vases, to the painter's signature hidden in a painting, from the pistol-shot dent on a breastplate guaranteeing its robustness to the brand stamped in silver to attest to its purity, the simple gesture of marking has accompanied the whole history of man's craft.

But if the gesture, and the idea behind it, may have remained the same for centuries, the same certainly cannot be said about the reasons to apply that brand, nor for the technologies used to mark it. If once, indeed, a sharp hammer blow branded the mark of purity in a metal ingot, nowadays we often have to mark objects which are far too delicate to resist that hammer blow, as it would shatter them, or which are built of materials which simply cannot be branded by physical carving, or yet again are just too tiny for even the thinnest burin and the most skillful artist's hand to brand them - let alone a hammer blow - even without taking into account the time and training it would require to do so on each piece, even if it were technically possible.

Think of an electronic chip, like those so widely used in modern digital technologies, which fill the computer and monitor we're using to read this article, our mobile phone, and dozens of other everyday objects: none of them could be marked with a hammer blow, lest it shatter in a thousand pieces. Not that this reduces the need to indicate codes, writings, distintive marks on those pieces anyway…

Sometimes the ideas which solve a problem come in a flash of light.And sometimes, they ARE a flash of light. We're talking about LASER, the same technology which records our movies and music on DVDs and CDs, and more to the point, we're talking about laser marking, a technology bending this tool to the many needs of marking. And we discussed it with a Company recognized throughout the world as an authority on the matter: Foba Italia.

Any doubts we could indeed have on using a ray of light (after all, that's what a laser is) to mark a plastic, or even metal object is definitely blown away on first observing the laser marking machines which are common on the field. That very light ray turns into the thinnest brush, less than a millimeter, and it's a brush which can burn away a light layer of paint and reveal the shiny metal underneath to form writing, or even carve that same metal in shapes and lines of incredible clarity, and yet again mark writing, codes, symbols in plastic or glass at incredible speeds, often under a second.

An ancient gesture, and the most modern technology. Marriages like this can only give the best of results.