ABSTRACT

Nario Taniguchi coined the word nanotechnology in 1974 to describe machining with tolerances of less than 1 µm (see Volume II, Figure 6.3). Humans are still best at building structures we can grasp with our hands and see with our eyes, and we have only relatively recently started to intentionally craft objects at the nanoscale with nanotechnology. Over the last  two decades, nanotechnology has come to mean two quite different things. In the broadest sense  it is any technology dealing with building structures between 1 and 100 nm in size, in a narrower sense, as promoted by K. Eric Drexel, it involves designing and building machines in which every atom and chemical bond is precisely specified.1