It was on 29 December 1959 that Richard Feynman first proposed the idea of using atoms to build nano-scale devices and machines. Speaking at a meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology, he gave a lecture that many now see as the trigger for nanotechnology. "The principles of physics", he told his audience, "do not speak against the possibility of manoeuvring things atom by atom."The idea that devices and machines could be built at a microscopic level – what we now call nanomachines – had been born.
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Balzani et al. (2004) studied this question.