Richard Feynman and nanotechnology

In 1959, in an after dinner speech at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Pasadena, Richard Feynman set out a remarkable vision of the future in a talk entitled ‘There's plenty of room at the bottom.’ The talk was subtitled ‘an invitation to enter a new field of physics’ and marked the beginning of what is now known as ‘nanotechnology’. Nanotechnology is concerned with the manipulation of matter at the scale of a nanometre -a thousand millionth of a metre. Atoms are typically a few tenths of a nanometre in size. Feynman emphasized that such an endeavour does not need new physics:

In his talk Feynman offered two prizes of $1000 each – one ‘to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor which is only 1/64 inch cube’, and a second ‘to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25000 smaller’ He had to pay out on both prizes – the first less than a year later, to Bill McLellan, a Caltech alumnus.