Feynman Envisions Nanotech: Plenty of Room at the Bottom

Richard Feynman stood before an audience of physicists at the California Institute of Technology on December 29, 1959, and described a world that did not yet exist: machines built atom by atom, entire libraries written on a pinhead, and surgical instruments small enough to operate inside a human cell. His lecture, "There Plenty of Room at the Bottom," delivered at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, is now recognized as the conceptual birth of nanotechnology, though the word itself would not be coined for another fifteen years. Feynman, already famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics that would earn him the 1965 Nobel Prize, approached the subject not as abstract theory but as an engineering challenge. He calculated that the entire Encyclopedia Britannica could be written on a pinhead if reduced by 25,000 times. He proposed tiny machines building even tinier machines, each generation manufacturing the next smaller, eventually reaching the atomic level where individual atoms could be arranged at will. The audience found the talk entertaining but not urgent. No tools existed to manipulate individual atoms, and the idea seemed like science fiction. Feynman offered two $1,000 prizes: one for a working motor no larger than 1/64th of an inch, another for writing text at 1/25,000 scale. The motor prize was claimed within months using watchmaking techniques, a result Feynman found disappointingly unimaginative. The text prize went unclaimed until 1985, when a Stanford graduate student used electron beam lithography to write the first page of "A Tale of Two Cities" at the required scale. By then, the scanning tunneling microscope, invented in 1981, had made it possible to image individual atoms. In 1989, IBM researchers used one to spell out the company logo by moving thirty-five xenon atoms on a nickel surface. The field Feynman envisioned now drives a global nanotechnology industry worth over $90 billion annually.