History of Nanotechnology: Timeline
- 1959: Richard P. Feynman delivers lecture titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. At the lecture, Feynman announced two challenges: creation of the “nanomotor” and scaling down letters small enough so as to be able to fit the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin and offers a prize of $1000 for the first individuals to solve each one.
- 1960: William McLellan constructs the nanomotor with 13 parts and claims the prize.
- 1965: Gordon Moore, a cofounder of Intel, observes that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. This comes to be known as “Moore’s Law”.
- 1974: First molecular electronic device is patented by Aviram and Seiden
- 1981: Scanning tunneling microscope (STM) invented
- 1985: Tom Newman solves Feynman’s second challenge and claims the prize.
- 1986: Atomic force microscope (AFM) is invented and leads to the discovery of fullerenes and carbon nanotubes.
