Nanatechnology (Part 2)

Evolution of Nanotechnology: First of all, at the end of 1959’s December, Richard Feynman draw the outline of nanotechnology. He asked, “Why can’t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin?” and answered his question saying “Let's see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Therefore, all what is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopedia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch---that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopedia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter---32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopedia Britannica.” [3] After that, approximately 22 years later, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer found the scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and observed the atoms. They rendered possible to make experiments on molecules and that’s why they won Nobel Prize at 1986. One fault of STM was that they can not work on insulator materials. Binnig found a solution for this later on and invented atomic force microscopy (AFM) which is really sensitive and can measure attraction between atoms and its pin which is at the ocular part of the microscope. Finally with the help of those developments, people started to improve nanotechnology from that time to today, and step by step nanotechnology took shape but those are the main improvements.

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