In this era, bigger is never said without better. Smart phones barely fit in your hand anymore, and buildings are always getting taller, and TV’s are known to only get larger.

Recently, scientists have been thinking about the opposite. They believe that the future will be smaller. Very small to the point that you can’t even see it. They call this Nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is a word used to describe a very large range of technology, engineering and science across a broad range of fields like chemistry, physics and biology. They all involve products created and experiments that are conducted at the nanoscale, which is 1 to 100 nanometers.

Nanometer isn’t usually a term used in everyday life, since it isn’t used to measure many things and very hard for people to grasp. Most people will say that an inch is a small unit of measurement, but there are 25,400,000 nanometers in an inch.

Have you ever read a newspaper? Well if you have you are aware of how thin the paper is. Most newspaper width is 100,00 nanometers thick. A single nanometer cannot really be compared to anything in everyday life, since that would be like comparing a tip of a pencil to the whole earth.

The history of this science traces back by physicist Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology in 1959. He said that it will happen in the future when scientist could manipulate atoms and molecules.  He never actually used the term nanotechnology. It wasn’t until a decade later it was used by Professor Norio Taniguchi. Even then, nanotechnology wasn’t actually a thing. It took until 1981, when the scanning tunneling microscope was created, so that enabled scientists to observe individual atoms. Along with this, the invention of the atomic force helped fuel the rise of nanotechnology.

Scientist wanted to control single molecule and atoms because of their many beneficial properties, like lighter weight, greater chemical reactivity and higher strength. An example of this could be the carbon nanotube. They invented this by rolling a sheet of graphite molecules into a tube. Once the molecules are shaped in a certain way they will be a material that is a staggering one-sixth of the weight of steel. But get this- hundreds and hundreds of times stronger! This material is hoped to be used more in vehicles like cars, trains, bikes, and trucks to give a large advance in fuel economy and the safety of passengers.