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Ever since the days of the Greeks and
Democritus, man has believed that when dividing up matter we will
eventually reach a point where we can divide no more because we have found
the essential unit of matter, then referred to as the atom. Through
experimentation man has discovered the basic composition of all matter in
that it is composed of 108 types of atoms, along with their various
isotopes. We have since discovered even smaller "fundamental
particles" such as bosons, muons, quarks, leptons, etc., which fit
into three different families. However, we will disregard those
developments and even smaller divisions of matter since it is the
characteristics of atoms and their effect on fabrication which we hope to
look at. These smaller divisions will be touched on in the
"Future" section but otherwise they are left to the reader's
exploration.
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Atomic Scale Thinking
We will start out history of nanotechnology by first starting with
atoms and the advancement in physics over the past century.
The story has many cloudy beginnings, but we might trace one root
to Joseph Proust in 1799 when he discovered that chemicals tended to
combine in particular ratios which later came to be knows as their
molecular formulas such as H20.
Next came the interesting observation of Brownian motion in 1827 by
which all particles at the microscopic level have an inherent energy that
causes them to constantly vibrate. Einstein
then articulated a theory in 1905 of this thermal energy based on heat and
how it would cause particles to naturally distribute in a certain volume.
This Brownian motion is part of the reason why
atoms have been so elusive and why some scientists have often argued that
we could never individually control atoms.
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Developments in Biology
Discovering DNA has been one of the landmark accomplishments of
science in the 20th century.
It was initially discovered by Watson and Crick in 1953 as they
viewed it through a microscope. With the rapid developments in science, by 1970 scientists
had already discovered many of the basic properties and had begun to
manipulate DNA by cutting, splicing, and recombining it with the help of
enzymes and ligases. A few
years later came a machine that could actually produce any desired DNA
sequence which was then programmed into a program.
The next step was reprogramming bacteria and other organisms to
produce desired proteins, and already we were into the era of using DNA on
that nanometer scale for manufacturing processes.
When pondering the constructions and design of nano-scale,
atomic-sized structures, scientists and futurists always naturally think of DNA, which it has perfected
through millennia of evolution. If science has already
demonstrated to us that replication and manufacturing can exist and in
fact thrive at that level, then what's to stop us from either imitating it
or creating something even better?
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Feynman's Speech
Contributions in
the fields of Physics, Biology, and Chemistry have all brought together
the information necessary to conceptualize and pursue
Nanotechnology. However, it was Richard P. Feynman, later Nobel Prize
Winner in Physics, who gave a dinner talk in 1959 for the American Physical Society
that seems to have started it all, or at least made the idea
tangible. His speech was entitled "There's
Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and postulated the idea you could
write the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin! This
would require text to be text be 1/25000th of its current size. He
also talked about somehow manipulating individual atoms, about miniaturizing
the computer, and developing better techniques and machinery
for viewing these tiniest of details. He then ended his speech with
the announcement of two prizes as incentives for others to go try out what
they could accomplish in this realm. One $1000 prize was for an
electric motor that could only be 1/64th of an inch cubed. The other
was for the first person who could shrink replicate a page of a book at
1/25000th scale so that it could be read by an electron
microscope.
Both prizes were claimed, in 1960 and 1985, respectively. Pictures
are included on pages 75 and 147 of Nano.
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K. Eric Drexler
It was Eric
Drexler who is most accredited with pushing the nanotechnology
revolution to where it is today by raising public awareness, educating
future researchers, and generally expounding upon the field.  He
was awarded the first PhD in nanotechnology ever. Drexler also
presented the idea of nanotechnology before a congressional committee in
1992 (Regis, 3). Ed Regis' book, Nano, in fact seems to be the
official or unofficial biography of Kim Eric Drexler, while tracing the
expansion of nanotechnology through its various scenarios. Drexler has
written three books, Molecular
Engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for
molecular manipulation (1981), Engines
of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986), and Unbounding
the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution (1991). All three are posted in
their original form by www.IMM.org, which is maintained by the Foresight
Institute, which he helped to found.
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