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Origins of Nanotechnology

The first documented introduction to nanotechnology took place in 1959, when Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. Although not actually using the term nanotechnology at the time, his talk portended its future research by raising the issue of building tiny machines with the ability of manufacturing objects with atomic exactitude, in essence a “bottom up” approach to manufacturing. He also suggested that data could be stored with tremendous density.

The word “nanotechnology” was first used in 1974 by Prof. Norio Taniguchi of Tokyo Science University to describe precision micromachining. However, discussions related to the topic did not really begin until 1986, when engineer K. Eric Drexler published his seminal work entitled Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology in which he unwittingly usurped the term and became known as its creator. The book caused much excitement. The term was adopted by many scientists, but quickly began to define work unrelated to that of Drexler’s, such as the simpler, product-focused research based on the creation of anything sized 1 to 100 nanometers (sometimes called “nanoscale technology” today). By the 1992, Drexler took to calling his work “molecular nanotechnology” in order to distinguish it from the rest.

Book Resources On Origins of Nanotechnology

Understanding Nanotechnology by Scientific American
Nanotechnology: A Gentle Introduction to the Next Big Idea by Mark A. Ratner, et al

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