Foundations

Where the idea came from

Nanotechnology has a tidy origin story and a messier real history. The tidy version starts with a lecture in 1959 and runs in a straight line to the present. The real version has several starting points, a long gap, a public argument, and a field that grew mostly from new instruments and new materials rather than from any single vision.

A lecture at Caltech

On 29 December 1959 the physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk to the American Physical Society at Caltech called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom". The Wikipedia article on the lecture summarises its themes: the possibility of manipulating individual atoms as a form of synthetic chemistry, of writing information at enormous density, of building microscopes far better than the electron microscopes of the day, and of making tiny machines by a chain of ever-smaller tools. Feynman also pointed out that at small scales the balance of forces changes, with gravity mattering less and van der Waals forces mattering more, and he cited living cells as proof that small structures can manufacture substances and store information.

The same article makes a point that the tidy story tends to skip. Although versions of the talk were reprinted in a few popular magazines, it went largely unnoticed until the 1980s. The lecture became famous in retrospect, after the field it seemed to predict had begun to exist.

A word coined for precision machining

The term itself came from a different direction. According to the Wikipedia article on Norio Taniguchi, the Tokyo University of Science professor coined "nano-technology" in 1974 to describe semiconductor processes such as thin-film deposition and ion-beam milling that showed control on the order of a nanometre. His background was in the high-precision machining of hard and brittle materials, and he studied how machining accuracy had improved from 1940 into the early 1970s, predicting that dimensional accuracies better than 100 nm would be reachable by the late 1980s. For Taniguchi the word described the end point of engineering precision, not a new kind of chemistry.

Drexler and molecular manufacturing

The meaning most people associated with the word in the 1980s and 1990s came from K. Eric Drexler. The Wikipedia article on Drexler describes him as an American engineer known for his work on molecular nanotechnology, whose 1991 doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was revised into the 1992 book Nanosystems. His earlier book, Engines of Creation, published in 1986, proposed a nanoscale "assembler" that could build copies of itself and of other complex objects, the idea that came to be called molecular nanotechnology. The Wikipedia history of nanotechnology names that book, together with the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope in 1981 and the discovery of fullerenes in 1985, as the convergence that brought the field into being in the 1980s.

The Drexler–Smalley debate

Drexler's vision did not go unchallenged. Richard Smalley, the Rice University chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene, became its best-known critic. The Wikipedia article on Smalley records that he was sceptical of molecular assemblers and summarised his objections as the "fat fingers" and "sticky fingers" problems: the claim that manipulating tools would be too large and too adhesive to pick and place individual atoms precisely. It adds that he worried Drexler's speculations about dangers threatened public support for nanotechnology, and that the two men exchanged letters published in Chemical & Engineering News as a point-counterpoint feature.

The Drexler article gives the other side. It says Smalley first set out his criticism in a 2001 article in Scientific American, later argued that nanomachines would have to resemble enzymes and work in water, and that Drexler regarded both arguments as attacks on positions he did not hold. The exchange in Chemical & Engineering News ran in December 2003. Readers of the literature from those years will find the argument echoed in editorials and commentaries, even though the research papers themselves mostly went on with other things.

How the field actually grew

While the argument about assemblers went on, the working field of nanoscience developed along more practical lines. The history article describes the early 2000s as a period of growing public awareness and controversy, of governments moving to fund research, and of the first commercial applications, which it notes were bulk uses of nanomaterials rather than the transformative applications some advocates had predicted.

The drivers were concrete. Scanning probe microscopes let researchers image and move individual atoms (see seeing and touching atoms). New forms of carbon, first fullerenes and then nanotubes, gave chemists and physicists materials whose properties depended on their nanoscale shape. Colloid chemists learned to grow semiconductor nanocrystals of controlled size. Chip makers pushed lithography below 100 nm. And biology offered, as Feynman had suggested, working examples of molecular machinery.

The history article also reaches much further back, noting that nanoparticles were used by craftsmen long before anyone could explain them, for instance in lustre glazes on medieval and Renaissance pottery that owe their metallic sheen to silver and copper nanoparticles in the glaze. The difference between that craft knowledge and modern nanoscience is not the particles but the understanding: the ability to make them deliberately, measure them one by one, and predict what they will do.

For the definitions that came out of this history, see what nanotechnology is; for the policy story that followed, see nanotechnology policy and the NNI.