Nanotechnology

"the next big thing is really small"

History

Throughout history of man, since the days of the Greeks and Democritus, people, especially scientists, have thought that all the things in this world could be broken down to a point where it is indestructible further. For a long time this basic was thought to be "atoms". Thorough many experiments and trials, scientists further discovered that there are several different types of atoms, and also that there are even smaller particles than the atoms, including, quarks, leptons, etc. But the quest for the tiniest particles didn't stop there.

In 1959, during a dinner talk titled, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, made the idea of smaller things evident to the people to the members of  American Physical Society that seems to have started the technology revolution later named "Nanotechnology".  His speech included the idea that you could write the whole Encyclopedia Britannica (a hard copy is 32 great big books that together weigh about a hundred pounds) on the head of a pin, which is 1/25000 the normal size. Now that's small! Towards the conclusion (end) of his speech, he offered $1,000 prizes for creating an electric motor that was a maximum 1/64th of an inch cubed in size. The other prize was for the first person to minimize a page of a book at 1/25000th scale so it could be clearly interpreted by an electron microscope. Both prizes were later claimed, in 1960 and 1985, correspondingly.

The term "nanotechnology" was conceived in 1974 by Norio Taniguchi to signify machining with tolerances of less than a micron.

Richard Feynman Father of Nanotechnology