Nanotechnology: Building from the Bottom end Building the Bottom Line

When, in 1959, Richard Feynman exhorted fellow scientists to share his vision of a world in which atoms would be used like tiny bricks to construct macro-scale objects from "the bottom up," he set off a contest of minds that resulted in the granting of his wish for microscopes 100 times more powerful than those of that day. Scanning-electron microscopes had been around for almost 30 years when Feynman gave his address, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." But the tools of Feynman's time did not satisfy his vision of the future. Feynman was not content to simply see atoms; he wanted to manipulate them as well. Twenty-three years later, in 1982, the first scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) was born. A short seven years after that, in 1989, Don Eigler, a scientist at IBM, made Feynman's vision a reality when he used an STM to spell out his employer's corporate initials, IBM, by arranging 35 individual xenon atoms on a nickel substrate. Today, that image remains a hallmark of advanced microscopy.