There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

In 1959, Richard Feynman gave the first talk on nanotechnology, entitled There's Plenty of Room at the Bottomhttp://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html. He considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry.

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Richard Feynman - Nanotechnology

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Feynman considered a number of interesting ramifications of a general ability to manipulate matter on an atomic scale. He was particularly interested in the possibility of denser computer circuitry and microscopes that could see things much smaller than is possible with scanning electron microscopes. Researchers at IBM created today's atomic force microscopes, scanning tunneling microscopes, and other examples of probe microscopy and storage systems such as Millipede.

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Scanning electron microscope - IBM - Atomic force microscope - Scanning tunneling microscope - Probe microscopy - Millipede

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Feynman suggested that it should be possible to manipulate atoms and molecules directly, an idea which was later realized by the use of the scanning tunneling microscope and the atomic force microscope. Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation, and he presented the "weird possibility" of building a tiny, swallowable surgical robot by developing a set of one-quarter-scale manipulator hands slaved to the operator's hands to build one-quarter scale machine tools analogous to those found in any machine shop. This set of small tools would then be used by the small hands to build and and operate ten sets of one-sixteenth-scale hands and tools, and so forth, culminating in a billion tiny factories to achieve massively parallel operations. (This idea was anticipated in part, down to the microscale, by science fiction author Robert Heinlein in his 1940 short novel Waldo.) As the sizes got smaller, we would have to redesign some tools because the relative strength of various forces would change. Gravity would become less important, surface tension would become more important, Van der Waals attraction would become important, etc. Feynman mentioned these scaling issues during his talk. Nobody has yet attempted to implement this thought experiment.

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Scanning tunneling microscope - Atomic force microscope - Massively parallel - Robert Heinlein - Waldo - Gravity - Van der Waals

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He concluded his talk with challenges to build a tiny motor and to write the information from a book page on a surface 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale. He offered prizes of $1000 for each challenge. Amazingly, his motor challenge was quickly met by a meticulous craftsman using conventional tools; the motor met the conditions, but did not advance the art. In 1985, Tom Newman, a Stanford grad student, successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities by 1/25,000, and collected the second Feynman prize.

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K. Eric Drexler later took the Feynman concept of a billion tiny factories and added the idea that they could make more copies of themselves, via computer control instead of control by a human operator, in his 1986 book '.

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K. Eric Drexler - 1986

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