There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
[1] Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more robust form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time.
Feynman also suggested that it should be possible, in principle, to make nanoscale machines that "arrange the atoms the way we want" and do chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation.
[2] He also presented the possibility of "swallowing the doctor", an idea that he credited in the essay to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs.
[4] Feynman also mentioned in his lecture that it might be better eventually to use glass or plastic because their greater uniformity would avoid problems in the very small scale (metals and crystals are separated into domains where the lattice structure prevails).
The first challenge involved the construction of a tiny motor, which, to Feynman's surprise, was achieved by November 1960 by Caltech graduate William McLellan, a meticulous craftsman, using conventional tools.
In 1985, Tom Newman, a Stanford graduate student, successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities by 1/25,000, and collected the second Feynman prize.
A "foresighted admirer" brought a tape recorder and an edited transcript, without Feynman's jokes, was made for publication by Caltech.
Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, has reconstructed the history of the publication and republication of Feynman's talk, along with the record of citations to "Plenty of Room" in the scientific literature.
These and other developments hint that the retroactive rediscovery of "Plenty of Room" gave nanotechnology a packaged history that provided an early date of December 1959, plus a connection to Richard Feynman.
[19] Toumey's analysis also includes comments from scientists in nanotechnology who say that "Plenty of Room" did not influence their early work, and most of them had not read it until a later date.
[3] More concretely, his stature and concept of atomically precise fabrication played a role in securing funding for nanotechnology research, illustrated by President Clinton's January 2000 speech calling for a federal program: My budget supports a major new National Nanotechnology Initiative, worth $500 million.
"[24]The version of the Nanotechnology Research and Development Act that the House passed in May 2003 called for a study of the technical feasibility of molecular manufacturing, but this study was removed to safeguard funding of less controversial research before it was passed by the Senate and signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 3, 2003.
[25] In 2016, a group of researchers of TU Delft and INL reported the storage of a paragraph of Feynman's talk using binary code where every bit was made with a single atomic vacancy.
