Feynman's 1959 nanotech talk was barely cited for 20 years

Richard Feynman gave his lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” on 29 December 1959, as an after-dinner talk at the nearby Huntington-Sheraton Hotel during the American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, and it is now hailed as the founding vision of nanotechnology, although scientists barely cited it for two decades.

Feynman asked why we could not work at far smaller scales: writing all 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin, fitting the 120,000 volumes of Caltech’s library onto something the size of a library card, and arranging matter atom by atom. “In the year 2000, when they look back at this age,” he said, “they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.”

He offered two $1,000 prizes. Caltech graduate William McLellan claimed the first within a year with a working electric motor inside a 1/64-inch cube. The second, for shrinking a page of text 25,000-fold, waited until 1985, when Stanford graduate student Tom Newman used an electron beam to write the opening page of A Tale of Two Cities in an area under six microns across.

Did it really launch nanotechnology?

The talk appeared in Caltech’s Engineering & Science in February 1960, and then largely vanished. Tracing it through the Science Citation Index, Chris Toumey found just three citations in the 1960s and four in the 1970s; it did not reach ten a year until 1992. Interest grew after futurist K. Eric Drexler came across a mention while researching a 1981 paper. Gerd Binnig, co-inventor of the scanning tunnelling microscope, told Toumey he had not read it, and IBM’s Don Eigler, who famously spelled out “IBM” in xenon atoms, said it had not shaped the technical side of his work:

“When it comes to nano, start looking at Binnig instead of Feynman.” (Don Eigler)

The vision was prescient, but the field largely got there on its own and adopted Feynman as an ancestor afterwards.