Nanotechnology

The term “nanotechnology” was first used in 1974 in Japan, by Norio Tanigushi of the University of Tokyo, to describe building and consolidation processes on a microscopic scale.

The term was made popular in the years between 1980 and 1985 by Eric K. Drexler (Director of the Foresight Institute of Technology), when he introduced the notion of “molecular machines and manufacturing”. But it was physicist Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize winner in 1959) who was the first scientist to introduce the idea that man will soon be able to transform matter at the atomic level.

In a visionary speech that has since become famous, given in December 1959 before the American Physical Society, he asserted that it would one day be possible to store the entire content of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin by writing tiny letters with atoms reorganized on their surface. This vision could not have become reality without the 1981 invention of the scanning tunneling microscope by Gerd Bining and Heinrich Roher at the IBM laboratories in Zurich. This microscope consequently made it possible to see atoms and move them around in structure surfaces so as to endow them with properties and functions they do not possess naturally.

Other scientific advances followed, such as those introduced by Professor Lehn, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and by his work on chemical self-assembly and molecular recognition, as well as host and guest molecules. This research became the origin of extended applications at the interface between chemistry, biology and engineering sciences. In 1991, S. Jyima of the NEC laboratory in Japan discovered carbon nanotubes with a new shape structured from carbon molecules whose physical properties could not be extrapolated from macroscopic models of matter.

These properties are still being studied, but nanotubes already have a multitude of applications: nanoelectronics, plasma sheaths, hydrogen storage, capacitors. Researches in microelectronics, and molecular biology prompted towards nanotechnologies, which constituted a crossroads of multidisciplinary knowledge of chemical and physical sciences, engineering sciences, computer science, and life sciences.