Nanotechnology can be defined as the study of the manipulation and application of matter on a molecular scale. According to Wikipedia, it generally deals with developing materials or other structures possessing a size of at least one hundred nanometers. The concepts of nanotechnology were considered fiction until December 29, 1959 during a talk entitled “There’s plenty of Room at the Bottom†by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology. In this talk, Feynman described a process by which individual atoms and molecules can be controlled and manipulated.
The term, “Nanotechnology†was coined over a decade later by Professor Norio Taniguchi. It wasn’t until 1981, with the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope and the atomic force microscope that could “see†individual atoms, that contemporary nanotechnology began (National Nanotechnology Initiative n.d). It is difficult to envision how small nanotechnology is.
