why silver, specifically
2026-08-25 · filed under notes
People ask why the company is named after a color and a satellite. The honest answer is that silver is the most technically interesting material we are allowed to have opinions about, and this is the shortest page that explains why.
Silver reflects more visible light than any other metal — roughly 95 percent — and it does so without adding a color of its own. Aluminum reflects nearly as much but tints things slightly blue. Gold reflects beautifully and turns everything warm. Silver is the only one that gets out of the way. That property — high performance plus total neutrality — is the design brief for everything on this site, and we did not have to invent it. We just noticed it.
Silver also tarnishes, which sounds like a defect until you look closer. The tarnish layer is conductive-ish, reversible with effort, and famously used as a visible record of exposure. A silver object tells you its own history. Most materials hide it.
And it melts at 961°C, conducts heat better than anything else measured, kills microbes on contact, and sits in the same column of the periodic table as copper and gold while refusing to behave like either. One material, four unrelated superpowers.
So: silver. Not because it is precious. Because it is useful in more directions than any other single material we know of, and because it looks like the moon, which — see conspiracy — may not be a coincidence.