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"As a writer, I don't want to chew my cud. I don't want to have to spit out and regurgitate the same stuff again."
- Harlan Ellison

Absolute Black  
  A material which, when covering an object, will reflect no light whatsoever.  

I don't know of an earlier treatment of this idea in science fiction.

A perfectly black object, he contended, would elude and defy the acutest vision.

“Color is a sensation,” he was saying. “It has no objective reality. Without light, we can see neither colors nor objects themselves. All objects are black in the dark, and in the dark it is impossible to see them. If no light strikes upon them, then no light is flung back from them to the eye, and so we have no vision-evidence of their being.”

“But we see black objects in daylight,” I objected.

“Very true,” he went on warmly. “And that is because they are not perfectly black. Were they perfectly black, absolutely black, as it were, we could not see them—ay, not in the blaze of a thousand suns could we see them! And so I say, with the right pigments, properly compounded, an absolutely black paint could be produced which would render invisible whatever it was applied to.”

...I visited Lloyd’s laboratory a number of times after that, and found him always deep in his search after the absolute black. His experiments covered all sorts of pigments, such as lamp-blacks, tars, carbonized vegetable matters, soots of oils and fats, and the various carbonized animal substances.


(Absolute Black from 'The Shadow and the Flash' by Jack London)

I dipped the brush into the seemingly empty pot, and gave him a long stroke across his chest. With the passage of the brush the living flesh disappeared from beneath. I covered his right leg, and he was a one-legged man defying all laws of gravitation. And so, stroke by stroke, member by member, I painted Lloyd Inwood into nothingness.

Technovelgy from The Shadow and the Flash, by Jack London.
Published by Not Known in 1903
Additional resources -

Compare to black coating from Gray Lensman (1942) by E.E. 'Doc' Smith, absolute black from Douglas Adams' 1980 book Restaurant at the End of the Universe and fuligin from Gene Wolfe's 1980 novel The Shadow of the Torturer.

Thanks to @SFFaudio for contributing this item!

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Shadow and the Flash
  More Ideas and Technology by Jack London
  Tech news articles related to The Shadow and the Flash
  Tech news articles related to works by Jack London

Absolute Black-related news articles:
  - Vantablack Now IMMEASURABLY Black

Articles related to Material
Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly
Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer
Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick
GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials

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