The first reference to nanotechnology was made by the physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) in his seminal 1959 lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he described the inevitability of creating machines at the scale of individual atoms, as well as the profound implications of doing so.[51] As Feynman said: “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom…. It would be, in principle, possible…for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down….
