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A BRIEF HISTORY OF NANOTECHNOLOGY

Reference is often made to a lecture given by Richard Feynman in 1959 at Caltech [85]. Entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", it expands his vision of machines making the components for smaller machines (a familiar enough operation at the macroscale), which when assembled are themselves capable of making the components for yet smaller machines, and simply continuing the sequence until the atomic realm is reached. Offering a prize of $1000 for the first person to build a working electric motor with an overall size not exceeding 1/64th of an inch, Feynman was dismayed when not long afterwards a student, William McLellan, presented him with a laboriously hand-assembled ( i.e. using the technique of the watchmaker) electric motor of conventional design that nevertheless met the specified criteria.

A similar idea was proposed at around the same time by Marvin Minsky: “Clearly it is possible to have complex machines the size of a flea; probably one can have them the size of bacterial cells... consider contemporary efforts towards constructing small fast computers The main line of attack is concentrated on "printing" or evaporation through masks. This is surely attractive in one operation. But an alternative, equally attractive, has been ignored. Imagine small machines fabricating small elements kilocycle rates. (The speed of small mechanical devices is extremely high.) Again, one can hope to make thousands of elements per second. But the generality of the mechanical approach is much greater since there are many structures that do not lend themselves easily to laminar mask construction" [209]. One wonders whether Feynman and Minsky had previously read Robert A. Heinlein's short story "Waldo", which introduces this idea (it was published in the August 1942 issue of "Astounding" magazine under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald).

Here, we find the germ of the idea of ​​the assembler, a concept later elaborated by Eric Drexler. The assembler is a universal nanoscale assembly machine, capable not only of making nanostructured materials but also other machines (including copies of itself). The first assembler would have to be laboriously built atom-by-atom, but once it was working its numbers could evidently grow exponentially, and when a large number was extant, universal manufacturing capability, hence the nano-era, would have truly arrived ( See also Chapter 8).

However, the idea of ​​a minute device intervening at the level of elementary particles was conceived almost a hundred years earlier by James Clerk Maxwell when he invented his “demon” for selectively allowing molecules to pass through a door, thereby entangling physics with information. Perhaps Maxwell should be considered as the real father of nanotechnology. The demon was described in Maxwell's Theory of Heat first published in 1871, but had already been mentioned in earlier correspondence of his.