In the Greek language, the word for dwarf is nanos.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures adopted the prefects

nano to mean one billionth.

A nanometer is a billionth of a meter,

and it's the scale at which some of the most groundbreaking work is

being done in technology and material science. Learn more about nanotechnology, its applications

and how it works on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. It isn't often that we know exactly when a particular branch of science started,

but in the case of nanotechnology, we have a pretty good idea of its precise origin.

The birth of nanotechnology dates back to a presentation given by the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman.

On December 29, 1959, he gave a presentation to the American Physical Society

which was meeting at Caltech University in California.

The title of the presentation was There's plenty of room at the

bottom an invitation to enter a new field of physics. In his presentation he

presented the theoretical idea that we could build machines on a much smaller scale,

that if we could manipulate individual atoms, it would have profound implications for the type of

things we could create.

Phyman noted that there was no particular reason why we couldn't make create. that as things shrank, the challenges involved would become very different than the creation

of machines that were accustomed to in our everyday life.

For starters, gravity would become less and less important the smaller you got.

However, other forces such as the van der Wall forces between atoms

would increase considerably.

Fineman had no idea how these new devices could be created. He just knew that there was nothing

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