nano_LINE

"When Third was lucky, she got a contract for weapons. The pay was good because it was dangerous.

The weapons would come gushing suddenly out of her with much loss of blood, usually in the middle of the

night: an avalanche of glossy, freckled, dark brown guppies with black, soft eyes and bright rodent smiles

full of teeth. No matter how ill or exhausted Third felt, she would shovel them, immediately, into buckets

and tie down the lids. If she didn't do that, immediately, if she fell asleep, the guppies would eat her.

Thrashing in the their buckets as she carried them down the steps, the guppies would eat each other.

She would have to hurry with them, shuffling as fast as she could under the weight, to the Neighbors.

The Neighbors only paid her for the ones that were alive. I was piecework."

*The Unconquered Country* (a novella, 1994), Geoff Ryman

[A single sugar molecule measures about a nanometer in diameter. At a billionth of a meter, a nanometer

is the essence of small. The width of 10 hydrogen atoms laid side by side, it is one thousandth the length of a

typical bacterium, one millionth the size of a pinhead.]

3.5 billion years ago the first living cells emerge. Cells house nanoscale biomachines that perform

such tasks as manipulating genetic materials.

400 B.C Democritus coins the word *atom* which means *not cleavable* in ancient Greek.

1905 Albert Einstein publishes part of his dissertation that estimates that diameter of a sugar

molecule is about one nanometer.

1931 Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska develop the electron microscope, which enables subnanometer imaging.

1959 Richard Feynman gives his talk *There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom* on the prospects for

miniaturization.

1968 Alfred Y. Cho and John Arthur of Bell Laboratories and their colleagues invent molecular-beam

epitaxy, technique that can deposit single atomic layers on the surface.

1974 Norio Taniguchi conceives the the word *nanotechnology* to signify machining with tolerances of less than

a micron.

1981 Ger Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer create the scanning tunneling microsope, which can image individual atoms.

1986 K. Eric Drexler publishes *Engines of Creation* that popularizes nanotech.

1989 Donald Eigler of IBM writes the letter of his company's name using 11 individual xenon atoms.

1991 Sumio Iijima of NEC in Tsukuba, Japan discovers carbon nanotubes.

1993 Warren Robinett of the University of North Carolina and R. Stanley Williams of the University of California

at Los Angeles devise a VR system connected to a scanning tunnelling microscope that lets the user see and touch

atoms.

1998 Cee Dekker's group at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands creates a transistor from nanocarbon

tubes.

1999 James M. Tour, now at Rice Universtiy, and Mark A. Reed of Yale University demonstrate that single molecules

can act as molecular switches.

2000 The Clinton administration announces the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which provides a big boost in

funding and gives the field greater visibility.

2000 Eigler and other reasearchers devise a quantum mirage. Placing a magnetic atom at one focus of an elliptical

ring of atoms creates a mirage of the same atom at another focus, a possible means of transmitting information

with wires.