How did it begin?
The ideas and concepts behind nanoscience and nanotechnology began with physicist Richard Feynman’s talk “Down Plenty of Space” at a meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology on December 29, 1959, long before the term nanotechnology was used. In his talk, Feynman described a process in which scientists would be able to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules. More than a decade later, Professor Norio Taniguchi introduced the term nanotechnology in his research on ultra-precision processing. Only in 1981, with the development of the scanning tunneling microscope, which could “see” individual atoms, did modern nanotechnology begin.
Fundamental concepts in nanoscience and nanotechnology
Medieval stained glass windows are an example of how nanotechnology was used in the pre-modern era.
It’s hard to imagine how small nanotechnology is. One nanometer is a billionth of a meter or 10-9 meters. Here are some illustrative examples:
There are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch.
On a comparative scale, if a marble were a nanometer, then one meter would be the size of the Earth.
Nanoscience and nanotechnology include the ability to see and control individual atoms and molecules. Everything on Earth is made up of atoms–the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the buildings and houses we live in, and our own bodies.
But something as small as an atom cannot be seen with the naked eye. In fact, it cannot be seen with the microscopes commonly used in high school science classes. The microscopes needed to observe the nanoscale were invented relatively recently, about 30 years ago.
When scientists had the right tools, such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and atomic force microscope (AFM), it was the age of nanotechnology.
Although modern nanoscience and nanotechnology are fairly new, nanoscale materials have been used for centuries. Variably sized particles of gold and silver created the colors in stained glass windows of medieval churches hundreds of years ago. Back then, artists simply didn’t know that the process they used to create these beautiful works of art actually led to changes in the composition of the materials they were working with.
Today’s 21st-century nanotechnology scientists and engineers are finding a wide range of ways to deliberately manufacture materials on a nanoscale basis to take advantage of their improved properties, such as higher strength, lower weight, better control of the light spectrum, and greater chemical reactivity than their larger counterparts.
