Science history: Richard Feynman gives a fun little lecture — and dreams up an entirely new field of physics — Dec. 29, 1959

On a December day, Richard Feynman gave a fun little lecture at Caltech — and dreamed up an entirely new field of physics.

During the talk, entitled "Plenty of room at the bottom," he described the enormous potential that could be realized if scientists could manipulate and control things at a "small scale."

How small? Feynman went on to discount advances of the time, such as writing the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, as trivial.

"But that's nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below," Feynman said in his lecture. Rather, he suggested, people could write the entire 24-volume encyclopedia on the head of a pin, and elegantly showed that there's enough space there to write it legibly and read it out.

He then explored the possibility of a number of then-futuristic ideas: electron microscopes capable of manipulating individual atoms, ultracompact data storage, miniaturized computers, and powerful, ingestible biological machines that travel into organs like the heart, find defects, and repair them with tiny knives. He proposed a number of ways to create these small-scale innovations, including manipulating light and ions.

He ended the lecture by offering a reward of $1,000 to anyone who could miniaturize the text in a book 25,000-fold, such that it could be read using an electron microscope. He offered another $1,000 to anyone who could make a motor no bigger than 1/64th of an inch cubed.

The latter of these prizes was scooped up the following year by engineer William McLellan, who created a 250-microgram motor composed of 13 parts. In his award letter, Feynman congratulated McLellan on the feat but joked that he shouldn't "start writing small," lest he solve the first challenge, too and expect to receive the other $1,000 prize.

"I don't intend to make good on the other one. Since writing the article I've gotten married and bought a house!" Feynman wrote.The former challenge was eventually solved in 1985, when Stanford graduate Thomas Newman miniaturized the first page of the Dickens classic "A Tale of Two Cities." Feynman did, ultimately, pay up for the second prize.

Feynman's Caltech talk is now mythologized as having ushered in the field of nanotechnology. And yet, the term "nanotechnology" itself was not coined until 15 years after his talk, when scientist Norio Taniguchi penned a paper about manipulating material at the atomic scale.

In that 1974 paper, Taniguchi described nanotechnology as "the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule." Many science historians now argue that the field was following its own trajectory, and that Feynman's talk, while prescient, wasn't the actual driver of future innovations. Prior to 1980, his talk was cited less than 10 times.

Whether it drove innovation or not, since Feynman's famous lecture, many of his predictions have proven true. The scanning tunneling microscope manipulated individual xenon atoms in 1990. Computers more powerful than he described now sit in our pockets, rather than taking up whole rooms. And indeed, tiny nanobots have been designed that can repair damaged blood vessels.