ABSTRACT
The concepts of nanotechnology or nanomaterials that seeded nanotechnology were rst discussed in 1959 by the renowned physicist Richard Feynman in his talk There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, in which he described the possibility of synthesis via direct manipulation of atoms. The term nanotechnology was rst used by Norio Taniguchi in 1974, though it was not widely known. Inspired by Feynman’s concepts, K. Eric Drexler independently used the term nanotechnology in his 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, which proposed the idea of a nanoscale assembler that would be able to build a copy of itself and of other items of arbitrary complexity with atomic control. Also in 1986, Drexler cofounded the Foresight Institute (with which Drexler is no longer af liated) to help increase public awareness and understanding of nanotechnology concepts and implications. Thus, the emergence of nanotechnology as a eld in the 1980s occurred through convergence of Drexler’s theoretical and public work, which developed and popularized a conceptual framework for nanotechnology and high-visibility experimental advances that drew additional wide-scale attention to the prospects of atomic control of matter. For example, the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981 provided unprecedented visualization of individual atoms and bonds and was successfully used to manipulate individual atoms in 1989. The microscope’s developers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 [1].
