The basic aim of nanotechnology is to manipulate atoms and molecules to produce materials with new properties.
This is by no means a new idea, being very similar to the goals of alchemy in the Middle Ages, when atoms and
molecules were yet unknown. Alchemy evolved into the chemistry of the present age, but even modern chemistry
basically attempts to add new properties to substances.
A key difference of nanotechnology is that it attempts to artificially control the way atoms and molecules join
up.
It was in December 1959 that physicist Richard
Feynman gave a historical speech that got people to start thinking seriously about the possibilities for nanotechnology.
Feynman claimed that if information could be written on an atomic scale, "all of the information that man has
carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written ... in a cube of material one two-hundredth
of an inch wide—about the size the smallest piece of dust visible to the human eye". He went on to stress
that there are no physical laws preventing the representation of computer bits to be reduced in size to a single
atom.
Feynman opened people's eyes to the fact that working at the molecular level held promise of opening up a new
world of technology.
What was imagined at this time was the fabrication of really tiny materials and components that could be used
to fabricate even tinier things, an approach known as the top-down approach. However, Feynman's speech did
not have a great impact at the time, perhaps because his ideas were regarded by most as pipedreams that, even
if theoretically feasible, would be impossible to implement.
In the 1970s, a Japanese physicist named Leo Esaki pioneered
the technology that would lead to the practical application of Feynman's ideas in the form of nanotechnology.
Esaki worked on manmade semiconductor structures, such as superlattices, showing that structures consisting
of layers of different materials with a thickness of from one to several atoms display heretofore unknown properties.
