Nanotechnology coming of age: Between new and legacy industries, time for tiny tech is now
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When famed physicist Richard Feynman posited in 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, "Why can't we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin?" he was envisioning what would become nanotechnology.
At the time, Feynman offered $1,000 to the first person who could reduce the page of a book to 1/25,000 linear scale, essentially readable only by an electron microscope.
Feynman finally was forced to pay up a quarter-century later by a graduate student at Stanford University, Thomas H. Newman, who shrunk the first page of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities." But it wasn't until 1991 when the theory of nanotechnology was propelled into existence by Japanese researcher Sumi Iijima, working with NEC Corp., with the discovery of the nanotube—a carbon-based filler that offers exceptional performance improvements in electrical conductivity, strength and other characteristics.