Nanotechnology encompasses science, engineering, and technology at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers.
How it started
The physicist Richard Feynman was the first to introduce “nanoscience” during his talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, given during the American Physical Society meeting in 1959.
In his talk, Feynman encouraged scientists to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules at nanoscale.
About ten years later, Prof. Norio Taniguchi coined the term “nanotechnology”.
Once scientists had the right tools, such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and the atomic force microscope (AFM), the age of nanotechnology was definitevly born.
Although modern nanoscience and nanotechnology are quite new, nanoscale materials have been used for centuries. For example, hundreds of years ago alternate-sized gold and silver particles created colours in the stained glass windows of medieval churches. The artists back then just didn’t know that the process they used to create these beautiful works of art actually led to changes in the composition of the materials they were working with.
Fundamental concepts in nanotechnology
For the human mind, used to measuring distances in metres, feet or fathoms, it’s hard to imagine just how small nanotechnology is. One nanometre (1nm) is a billionth of a metre, or 10-9 of a metre. Here are some examples:
– human hair: 50,000–100,000 nanometres in diameter
– a sheet of newspaper is about 100,000 nanometres thick;
– in an inch there are 25,400,000 nanometres;
– a girl 1.7 m tall: ~1700 million nanometres tall.
