KEY POINTS:
Richie McCaw has signed his name to countless fans' shirts in his career, so receiving an All Black jersey with the names of up to 100,000 supporters on it might help to even the score.
When McCaw and the All Blacks he captains travel to Hong Kong in October to battle Australia for the Bledisloe Cup, they will be presented with a jersey with the fans' names printed into the fibre in writing so small, it is invisible to the naked eye.
But the names will be there on the fibres that make up the silver fern, says Canterbury University professor Richard Blaikie, who is using cutting-edge nanotechnology to fit 100 names on a millimetre of fibre.
McCaw, who got a glimpse yesterday of the technology involved, said: "I never thought it was possible. But it's quite a cool concept I think.
"Hopefully the fans will appreciate what it's all about too. It's a little bit of something they can do, and we can take out of it."
Professor Blaikie said a high-quality electron beam was used as "essentially a very, very sharp pencil" to write on a stamp, to then print onto the jersey fibre.
"Really it is that simple, but the devil is in the detail. In particular, the thing that was our research challenge was to take that stamp and then imprint it onto something we are not used to."
A lot of failures and head scratching occurred in the months before his team got the names of all 1073 All Blacks on a fibre.
While 100 names in 1mm was not a very small scale in nanotechnology, it worked right for printing on the texture of fibre, Professor Blaikie said.
In the past, nanotechnology has seen authors write their names and their book titles on a strand of human hair, and the Bible has been printed on a grain of rice.
The jersey given to the players travelling to Hong Kong will not be worn on the field, but McCaw hopes that will happen one day.
