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By Root 2409 0

reversing the lenses of an electron microscope, for example, and focusing a beam of ions to a small spot. At this scale, the world’s entire store of book knowledge could be carried about in a small pamphlet. But direct reduction would be crude, he continued. Telephones and computers had given rise to a new way of thinking about information, and in terms of raw information—allowing six or seven “bits” per letter and a generous one hundred atoms per bit—all the world’s books could be written in a cube no larger than a speck of dust. His audience, unaccustomed to lectures of this kind at American Physical Society meetings, was enthralled. “Don’t tell me about microfilm!” Feynman declared.

He had several reasons for thinking about the mechanics of the atomic world. Although he did not say so, he had been pondering the second law of thermodynamics and the relationship between entropy and information; at atomic scales came the threshold where his calculations and thought experiments took place. The new genetics also brought such issues to the surface. He talked about DNA (fifty atoms per bit of information) and about the capacity of living organisms to build tiny machinery, not just for information storage but for manipulation and manufacturing. He talked about computers: given millions of times more power, they would not just calculate faster but would reveal qualitatively different abilities, such as the ability to make judgments. “There is nothing I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now,” he said. He talked about problems of lubrication, and he talked about the realm where quantum-mechanical laws would take over. He envisioned machines that would make smaller machines, each of which would make machines that were smaller still. “It doesn’t cost anything for materials, you see. So I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously, drilling holes, stamping parts, and so on.” He concluded by offering a pair of one-thousand-dollar prizes: one for the first microscope-readable book page shrunk 25,000 times in each direction, and one for the first operating electric motor no larger than a 1/64th-inch cube.

Caltech’s magazine Engineering and Science printed Feynman’s talk, and it was widely reprinted elsewhere. (Popular Science Monthly retitled it “How to Build an Automobile Smaller than This Dot.”) Twenty years later there was a name for the field Feynman had been trying to invent: nanotechnology. Nanotechnologists, partly inspired and partly crackpot, made tiny silicon gears with carefully etched teeth and displayed them proudly in their microscopes; or imagined tiny self-replicating robot doctors that would swim through one’s arteries. They thought of Feynman as their spiritual father, although he himself never returned to the subject. In the crude mechanical sense, tiny machines seemed a feature of a future just as distant as in 1959. The mechanical laws of physics meant that friction, viscosity, and electrical forces did not scale down as neatly as Feynman’s imagined billion tiny factories. Wheels, gears, and levers tended to glue themselves together. Tiny machines had come into being, storing and manipulating information even more efficiently than he had predicted. But they were electronic, not mechanical, using quantum mechanics, not fighting it. Not until 1985 did Feynman have to pay the thousand dollars for tiny writing: a Stanford University graduate student, Thomas H. Newman, spent a month shrinking the first page of A Tale of Two Cities onto silicon by almost exactly the technique Feynman had outlined.

The tiny motor did not take so long. Feynman had underestimated existing technology. A local engineer, William McLellan, read the Engineering and Science article in February. By June, when he had not heard any more, he decided he had better make the motor himself. It took two months of working in his spare time, using a watchmaker’s lathe and a microdrill press, drilling invisible holes and wrapping