History of Nanotechnoly and Some Uses

HISTORY OF NANOTECHNOLY AND SOME USES

“The revolutionary Feynman vision launched the global nanotechnology race.” – Eric Drexler, an American engineer. Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. In its innovative sense, nanotechnology refers to the projected capacity to build up items from the bottom up – a technique to construct systems by solving the problem by breaking it into small parts – and using other tools and techniques being developed today to make complete and high performance product.

In 1959, during a talk called ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.’ held at California Institute of Technology (also known as Caltech), Richard Feynman first introduced the idea of nanotechnology. Though he never explicitly mentioned the term “nanotechnology”, Feynman suggested that it will eventually be possible to precisely manipulate molecules and atoms. Moreover, he also stated that it was possible to create ‘nano-scale’ machines, through a flow of billions of factories. According to the physicist, these factories would be progressively smaller scaled versions of machine hands and tools. He suggested that these tiny scaled machines would gradually be able to create billions of even tinier machines. Feynman’s talk was viewed as the first academic talk that dealt with a main theory of nanotechnology.

Though Feynman brought this theory, the latter was not fully realized till the eighties and nineties. Ultimately then, it was during 1979 that the word ‘nanotechnology’ was invented. Professor Norio Taniguchi from Tokyo University of Science defined nanotechnology as follows: “Nanotechnology mainly consists of the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or by one molecule.”

In the early 1080s, Eric Drexler explored the fundamental idea of this definition in much more depth. Drexler came across Feynman’s talk about nano-factories. Feynman’s ideas inspired Drexler to put these...