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Modern Times

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Saved by frogheart@...
on July 7, 2008 at 12:07:49 pm
 

The converntional narrative for a nanotechnology origin story starts with US physicist Richard Feynman and his famous 1959 lecutre to the American Physical Society in 1959, titled 'There's lots of room at the bottom'. Next, a Japanese engineer named Norio Taniguchi in his talk to the ???? in 1974 coined the phrase nanotechnology.This is followed by the mention of K. Eric Drexler a US engineer who wrote the book, Engines of Creation, which lauded the coming nanotechnology age and has haunted him since its publication in 1986.

 

The basics are not disputed however, it has been pointed out that science fiction writers got there first.

 

Contrast this passage from the widely believed ur text for nanotechnology'There’s lots of room at the bottom',

 

 A hundred tiny hands

When I make my first set of slave ``hands'' at one-fourth scale, I am going to make ten sets. I make ten sets of ``hands,'' and I wire them to my original levers so they each do exactly the same thing at the same time in parallel. Now, when I am making my new devices one-quarter again as small, I let each one manufacture ten copies, so that I would have a hundred ``hands'' at the 1/16th size. (Feynman, 1959)

 

with this excerpt from Robert Heilein's 1942 short story, 'Waldo' where he could,

driectly manipulate microscopic materials by means of his own human hands.

 

According to some sources (Bowman, Hodge, and Binks, 2007), science fiction writers got there first. Robert Heinlein’s story Waldo originally published in 1942, describes the science this way,

…smaller and smaller devices are created by Waldo to enable him to ‘directly manipulate microscopic materials by means of his own human hands’. The story similarly discusses the prospect of building microscopic machines for the purposes of traveling through the human body to perform surgical procedures. (438)

The resemblance is striking. While, there is no evidence that Feynman read or even knew of Heinlein’s story, it’s proof the idea was already being discussed via science fiction.

 

Source: de la Giroday, Maryse (2008) Engaging Nanotechnology: popular culture, media. and public awareness. Unpublished paper.

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