Nano Technology

Nano Technology

The ideas and concepts behind nanoscience and nanotechnology started with a talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) on December 29, 1959, long before the term nanotechnology was used. In his talk, Feynman described a process in which scientists would be able to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules. Over a decade later, in his explorations of ultraprecision machining, Professor Norio Taniguchi coined the term nanotechnology. It wasn't until 1981, with the development of the scanning tunneling microscope that could "see" individual atoms, that modern nanotechnology began.

National Nanotechnology Initiative

Size of the Nanoscale

Just how small is “nano?” In the International System of Units, the prefix "nano" means one-billionth, or 10-9; therefore one nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. It’s difficult to imagine just how small that is, so here are some examples: 

A sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick

A strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter

There are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch

A human hair is approximately 80,000- 100,000 nanometers wide

A single gold atom is about a third of a nanometer in diameter

On a comparative scale, if the diameter of a marble was one nanometer, then diameter of the Earth would be about one meter

One nanometer is about as long as your fingernail grows in one second