-the term "nano" comes from a Greek prefix

-a nanometer is one billionth of a meter

-nanotechnolgy is building machines one atom at a time

-first described by Nobel lauriate physicist Richard Feynman

-in 1959 he gave  a lecture called "There's plenty of room at the bottom" in which he suggested that the laws of physics would allow people to use small to make smaller machines eventually onto the atomic level

-the first one to coin the term K. Eric Drexler, one time student of Feynman's

With the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope and the atomic force microscope, scientists were allowed to not only take photographs of single atoms but also to move atoms one by one.

In 1981 the first journal article was written about nanotechnology titled “Protein Design as a Pathway to Molecular Manufacturing” in which explains the components of molecular robotics.