From Ultra-Precision Machining to Self-Replicating Assemblers

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The word nanotechnology itself has two separate parents who never met. Norio Taniguchi, a professor at Tokyo Science University, coined nano-technology in 1974 to describe ultra-precision machining capable of controlling a material down to the level of a single atom or molecule, a usage grounded firmly in conventional manufacturing. K. Eric Drexler arrived at the same term independently in a 1981 paper, then popularized a far more ambitious idea in his 1986 book Engines of Creation: molecular nanotechnology built around self-replicating molecular assemblers, a vision closer to Feynman's speculative 1959 talk than to Taniguchi's machine shop. The same year Drexler's independent paper appeared, 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zurich built the scanning tunneling microscope, the instrument that gave the field its eyes and hands at once: it could image individual atoms and, as IBM Almaden researchers demonstrated in 1990 by arranging 35 xenon atoms into the company's own logo, reposition them one at a time. The applications that followed favored Taniguchi's precision-manufacturing sense of the word over Drexler's assemblers: nanoscale transistor features in ordinary computer chips, carbon nanotubes, nanoscale coatings, and, in November 1995, Doxil, a nanoparticle-encapsulated chemotherapy drug and the first nanotechnology-based medicine the United States Food and Drug Administration ever approved.