Nowadays, nanotechnology permeates almost every facet of modern technology. Go large or go home is out; go small to rule them all is in – not really, but size in tech matters now more than ever. And, it turns out, the smaller the better.
A nanometre is a unit of measurement so infinitesimally small that materials manipulated at this scale start to show quantum effects. But long before scientists theorised it and turned it into a bona fide, useful field of technology, it was already being put to use. It just didn’t have a name or any understanding of what was really going on.
1,700 years too early
The first known example of nanoparticles being used to manipulate light – by disrupting the quantum state of a material – comes from the Romans, around the 4th century AD. The Lycurgus Cup is a remarkable feat of craftsmanship that exploits nanoscale effects to change colour depending on how light hits it. Lit from the front, so that light bounces back off it, the glass appears an opaque jade green. Lit from behind, so that light passes through it, it turns a translucent, blood red colour. The cup is currently on display at The British Museum.
Nanotechnology, of course, meant nothing to the people who made the cup. It was simply trial and error, using shavings of gold and silver ground down to the nanoscale to create the desired effect.
Feynman plants a seed of molecule manipulation
Understanding has come a long way since the 4th century. The next milestone – and probably the most widely cited, and most contested, moment in the story of nanotechnology (though it still had no name at the time) – comes from physicist Richard Feynman.
In 1959, Feynman gave a talk at Caltech called ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.’ In it, he argued that no physical law prevents us from manipulating individual atoms and molecules. In fact, he theorised that we might one day write the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin, or build machines that build smaller machines, all the way down to the atomic scale.
The talk had little direct influence on the field at the time, but it was rediscovered years later and is now the point from which many origin stories of nanotechnology begin.
Who actually discovered nanotechnology?
If the Romans stumbled onto it, and Feynman theorised about it, who gets to claim they “discovered” nanotechnology?
In a 1974 paper, Norio Taniguchi, a Japanese scientist at the University of Tokyo, coined the term “nanotechnology” to describe precision manufacturing capable of achieving tolerances at the nanometre scale. Today, what Taniguchi described would be classed as “extreme precision engineering” rather than nanotechnology proper.
The term was later popularised by American engineer K. Eric Drexler. In his 1986 book ‘Engines of Creation’, Drexler set out a vision for “molecular manufacturing” – self-replicating molecular machines capable of building objects atom by atom. He explored the possible consequences of this vision, some good, some not so good. He then went on to earn the first PhD awarded by MIT in the subject. Later, he expanded on the idea in a more technical work, ‘Nanosystems’, where he attempted to put molecular manufacturing on rigorous physical footing.
This line of thinking, however, was disputed as being physically implausible. Nobel laureate Richard Smalley argued that chemistry doesn’t allow for the kind of precise atomic “fingers” that Drexler’s assemblers would need to place atoms one by one. The debate resulted in the conversation moving away from Drexler’s molecular-assembler concept and toward more chemically grounded approaches to building at the nanoscale.
The instruments to turn theory into reality
Up to this point, the vision of manipulating matter atom by atom remained speculative. Without the tools to test it, there was no way to prove it could be done.
That changed with the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) in 1981, built by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zurich – work that earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. The STM allowed scientists to image individual atoms on a surface for the first time. The atomic force microscope (AFM) followed soon after, extending these capabilities to non-conductive materials as well.
From here, materials discoveries came thick and fast, giving the field of nanotechnology real scientific substance.
From theory to proof to funded
Now that there was the instrumentation to prove the theory, the next step was to move nanotechnology from a speculative or fringe concept and into a properly funded, mainstream research discipline. As it became more understood and institutionalised, the field moved away from Drexler’s molecular-manufacturing vision and towards nanoscale materials science, nanoelectronics, and nanomedicine. This culminated in the US with the launch of the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2000, which coordinates federal funding and research across multiple agencies. Similar national programmes soon followed in Japan, the EU, and elsewhere.
It’s a pattern nanotechnology shares with plenty of other technological breakthroughs. A great mind conceptualises an idea, engineers build the instruments to test it, the discoveries pile up until the economic and practical benefits become impossible to ignore – and then government funding arrives to turn a possible future into a real one.
