The conventional narrative for a nanotechnology origin story starts with US physicist Richard Feynman and his famous 1959 lecture to the American Physical Society titled 'There's lots of room at the bottom' where he speculated about working with atoms and molecules directly to store information, create materials, and many of the applications currently being investigated in nanotechnology labs. (For more about the science, under Jump joints, click on The Science behind Nanotech.)
Next, a Japanese engineer named Norio Taniguchi in his paper for the Japan Society for Precision Engineering in 1974 coined the phrase nanotechnology. Very quickly, the new science idea became a technology. This movement from science to technology was further cemented by K. Eric Drexler a US engineer who wrote a popular science book, 'Engines of Creation', lauding the coming nanotechnology age.
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 'origin' text for nanotechnology 'There’s lots of room at the bottom',
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.
with this description of Robert Heinlein's 1942 short story,
In Waldo, Heinlein (1942/1965) described a process of molecular manipulation, in which smaller and smaller devices are created by Waldo to enable him to "directly manipulate microscopic materials by means of his own human hands."
Nobody can prove that Feynman ever read 'Waldo' or any of the other science fiction stories which seem to presage nanotechnology. But, Feynman's friend, Albert R. Hibbs, a senior staff scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is reputed to have read 'Waldo' and discussed with him the period before the legendary 1959 talk. (For more about the writers, under Jump joints, click on Storytellers create nano.)
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