Today's nanoscience wouldn't be possible without the work of Dr. Gaird Benig.

He and his colleagues invented the first tools to see and manipulate objects as small as an atom.

In 1986, Dr. Benig shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for the design of the scanning-tunling microscope.

And later, in 2016, he shared the Cavley Prize in nanoscience for the invention of the atomic force microscope.

Both discoveries had a transformative impact on nanoscience.

Scientific American custom media, in partnership with the Cavley Prize, reconnected with Gaird to discuss how his work made it possible to see and create the things that once only existed in our imaginations.

Before Gaird Benig came along, scientists didn't really know how atoms behave.

There were lots of theories and there were lots of indirect methods that tried to observe a matter on the atomic scale.

But no one could actually see those atoms.

If you can observe the atoms, you can test your theories and you can come up with ideas.

Otherwise, you are completely blind and you don't know what you are really doing.

So, Gaird and his colleagues set out to build a machine that made those observations possible.

First, they invented something called the scanning-tunling microscope or STM.

It used electricity to create images of atoms.

The trick had certainly the fantasy of many people because now the first time you could look at the atomic structure of any kind of conducting material and you can also shuffle atoms around and manipulate it.

While Gaird and his colleagues won a Nobel Prize for inventing the scanning-tunling microscope, he wasn't satisfied.

The STM could only work on surfaces that conduct electricity.

He wanted to create a device that could work with atoms on other surfaces too.

I tortured my brain by asking this question.

The STM is so successful but it's so limited.

So, I tortured my brain and then it came up with logical ideas again and again and they were all crazy and would not work.

But Gaird says as he was torturing his brain with logic, his subconscious was working in the background.

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