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Plenty of room, plenty of history

Nature Nanotechnology volume 4, pages 783–784 (2009)Cite this article

A 1959 lecture by Richard Feynman has become an important document in the history of nanotechnology but, as Chris Toumey reports, there are disagreements about when it became important, and why.

Feynman did not use the term 'nanotechnology', and neither did anyone else at the time. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that this lecture was a vision of what we now call nanotechnology, and parts of Feynman's vision have indeed been realized. Engineering and Science, the Caltech magazine, printed the talk in February 1960 (ref. 1). Shorter versions appeared in Saturday Review 2 and Popular Science3, and the paper was also published in California Institute of Technology Quarterly4, a volume of essays entitled Miniaturization5 and in the Technion Yearbook for 1962 (ref. 6). The fact that Feynman's lecture was published six times in just three years is a remarkable tribute to Feynman's brilliance and eloquence7.

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  1. Chris Toumey is at the University of South Carolina NanoCenter. Toumey@mailbox.sc.edu,

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Toumey, C. Plenty of room, plenty of history. Nature Nanotech 4, 783–784 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2009.357

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