Question

history of Nanotechnology

Answer 1

The earliest systematic discussion of nanotechnology is a speech given by Richard Feynman in 1959, under the title: "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." In this speech Feynman described how physical phenomena change their manifestation depending on size. He also posed two challenges: the creation of a nanoomotor, and the scaling down of letters to the size that would allow the whole Encyclopedia Britannica so that it would fit on the head of a pin.

The term 'nanotechnology' was used first by the Japanese scientists Norio Taniguchi in his 1974 paper on production technology that creates materials and features in the order of a nanometer scale. The Engineer from America K. Eric Drexler (b. 1955) is in specific credited with the development of molecular nanotechnology, leading to nanosystems machinery manufacturing.The invention of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in the 1980s by IBM Zurich scientists and then the atomic force microscope (AFM) helped scientists to see materials at an atomic level.

Breakthrough developments

1. In 1990 when a team of physicists of IBM, had spelled out the letters "IBM" using 35 individual atoms of xenon.
2. In 1985 with the discovery of new shapes for molecules of carbon, known as the buckyball, which are round and consist of 60 carbon atoms. This led to the discovery of a related molecular shape known as the carbon nanotube (CNT) in 1991.
3. CNT are even now, one of the most promising areas of nanotechnology as they are about 100 times stronger than that of steel but just 1/6^th of the weight; they have unusual heat and conductivity characteristics.
4. Discovery of quantum dots, whose properties are between those of bulk semiconductors and discrete molecules.