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There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom

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1959 lecture by Richard Feynman on writing, reading and building things at the scale of atoms

"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" is a lecture given by the American physicist Richard Feynman on December 29, 1959, at the winter meeting of the American Physical Society held at the California Institute of Technology. Its subtitle was "An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics". The text was printed in the February 1960 issue of Engineering and Science, Caltech's magazine.[1]

Feynman asked why the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica could not be written on the head of a pin, worked out what that would take, and went on to machines, surgeons and computers built from a few atoms each. He ended by offering two prizes of $1,000. The talk is often named as the first statement of nanotechnology, a reputation that it gained mostly in the 1990s.[2]

The lecture

The pin and the books

Feynman opened by saying that people kept telling him about miniaturization, about electric motors the size of a fingernail and a device that could write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, and that this was "the most primitive, halting step" in the direction he meant. "In the year 2000," he said, "when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction."[1]

He then did the arithmetic. A pinhead is a sixteenth of an inch across. Magnified 25,000 diameters, its area equals that of all the pages of the encyclopedia, so the writing would have to be reduced 25,000 times. The smallest dot visible to the eye, about 1/120 of an inch across in a half-tone reproduction, would shrink to 80 angstroms, or about 32 atoms in a metal, and so would still contain about a thousand atoms.[1] A letter written in a code of dots and dashes needs about six or seven bits, and a bit could be a cube of atoms 5 by 5 by 5. Feynman assumed that the world held 24 million books, each as large as an encyclopedia volume. Their content came to about 1015 bits, and at 100 atoms to the bit it would fit in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide, "the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye". He concluded that there was plenty of room at the bottom, and asked his audience not to mention microfilm.[1]

Biology and the microscope

The biological system, he argued, had already done this. All the information needed to make "a complex creature such as ourselves" is stored in a tiny fraction of a cell as long-chain DNA molecules "in which approximately 50 atoms are used for one bit of information about the cell".[1] Reading such a code was the problem. The electron microscope of 1959 resolved about 10 angstroms, which is 1 nm. Feynman wanted it improved a hundredfold, and he said that nothing in the laws of diffraction of the electron stood in the way. "The wave length of the electron in such a microscope is only 1/20 of an angstrom. So it should be possible to see the individual atoms."[1]

He listed what biologists would learn: the order of amino acids in a protein, the structure of RNA, where the proteins sit. "It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing! You will see the order of bases in the chain; you will see the structure of the microsome."[1] Chemistry, he added, would get the same help: "It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical substance; all one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times too poor."[1]

Machines

The second half is about making things. Feynman described a chain of small machine tools, each set making a smaller set, and a suggestion from his friend Albert Hibbs for surgery: "swallow the surgeon", a mechanical device put into a blood vessel to look at a faulty heart valve and cut it out. He also asked whether atoms could be arranged one by one as chemists wished, "the very atoms, all the way down", provided the result was not chemically unstable.[1]

The prizes

A logarithmic ruler of lengths from one meter to one picometer with the sizes from Feynman's lecture marked on it
The lengths in Feynman's lecture and in the page prize, on a logarithmic ruler drawn by code. Reducing a book page 25,000 times takes it from about 150 mm to about 6 micrometers, still about 17,000 times wider than the spacing of the bases in DNA.

He closed with two offers of $1,000. The first was for the first person to take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale, so that it could be read by an electron microscope. The second was for an operating electric motor, controllable from outside, no more than 1/64 of an inch on a side, excluding its lead wires. He did not expect the prizes "to wait very long for claimants".[1]

The motor was built within a year by William McLellan, a Caltech graduate. Caltech's magazine reported that Feynman, having since married and bought a house, "hasn't got another spare $1,000".[3]

The page prize waited until 1985. Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford with his thesis nearly finished, was told by a labmate who had just read the transcript to try Feynman's remaining challenge. His adviser, R. Fabian W. Pease, was away at a conference, and in two days Newman worked out a method. He took a bound copy of A Tale of Two Cities from his shelf and used a pattern generator with a grid of 512 by 512 pixels to scan an electron beam across a layer of poly(methyl methacrylate). The first page of Dickens's novel came out in lines 25 nm wide, in an area 6 µm square on a plastic square 200 µm on a side, and Newman learned to bring a map to the microscope to find it.[3][4][5]

On October 12, 1985 he and Pease sent Feynman a telegram: "Please advise if prize has been collected for reducing a page of text 25 thousand-fold to be readable in an electron microscope." Feynman telephoned within weeks to ask what they were doing, Newman mailed him micrographs on November 5, and a letter of congratulation arrived with a check for $1,000.[3] Pease recalled that Newman first wanted to frame the check but settled for framing a copy and spending the money.[4]

Reception

Few people cited the lecture for a long time. Chris Toumey, an anthropologist, traced its publication history and searched the Science Citation Index. He found three citations to the 1960 text in the 1960s and four in the 1970s. The first, by John R. Platt in 1962, agreed with Feynman that physics and chemistry now made better electron microscopes for biology possible and asked for a national laboratory for biological instrumentation. In 1970 A. V. Crewe, J. Wall and J. Langmore published pictures of single heavy atoms and did not cite Feynman or Platt for the significance of the result.[2][6] K. Eric Drexler told Toumey that he first met the title in a Physics Today article of November 1979, while looking for references for a paper of 1981.[2]

Toumey also found that references to the lecture "exploded in the early 1990s, just after the Eigler-Schweizer experiment", in which Donald Eigler and Erhard Schweizer positioned 35 xenon atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope in 1990, and the November 1991 special issue of Science on nanotechnology.[2][7] Several nanotechnologists he questioned said the lecture had not influenced their early work. Toumey's reading is that the retroactive rediscovery gave the new field a packaged history, with an early date in December 1959 and a connection to Feynman. Feynman returned to the subject in a talk of 1983, published in 1993 as "Infinitesimal machinery".[8]

Reading molecules

The lecture's biology section describes, in one sentence, the program that Electron microscopy DNA sequencing later tried: put a heavy-atom label on each base of a DNA molecule, image the molecule in an electron microscope and read the labels along it. A paper of 1962 asked whether such a marker could be seen, and the company Halcyon Molecular pursued the approach until it closed in 2012.

Nanopore sequencing took a different route. Nothing is imaged. The molecule is read by what it does to an electric current as it passes through a hole a few nanometers wide, and the method belongs to single-molecule biophysics: molecules are examined one at a time and none is seen.

At Molecular Reality

Molecular Reality Corporation cites the lecture. The founder, Kent Kemmish, worked on electron-microscope sequencing at Halcyon from 2009 to 2012, and the company's quiz game JeoPOREdy! credits the lecture with "the first ever proposed method to sequence DNA".[9] The company's question of March 2026, The Very Big Question, asks for a device that can "see" any molecule without affinity labels.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Feynman, Richard P. (1960). "There's plenty of room at the bottom". Engineering and Science 23 (5): 22-36.
  2. ^ a b c d Toumey, Chris (2008). "Reading Feynman into nanotechnology: a text for a new science". Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 12 (3): 133-168. doi:10.5840/techne20081231.
  3. ^ a b c Katherine Kornei (November 1, 2016). "The beginning of nanotechnology at the 1959 APS meeting". APS News. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
  4. ^ a b Pease, R. Fabian W. "Feynman's incentive prizes". Physics Today.
  5. ^ Newman, T. H.; Williams, K. E.; Pease, R. F. W. (1987). "High resolution patterning system with a single bore objective lens". Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B 5 (1): 88-91. doi:10.1116/1.583934.
  6. ^ Crewe, A. V.; Wall, J.; Langmore, J. (1970). "Visibility of single atoms". Science 168 (3937): 1338-1340. doi:10.1126/science.168.3937.1338.
  7. ^ Eigler, D. M.; Schweizer, E. K. (1990). "Positioning single atoms with a scanning tunnelling microscope". Nature 344 (6266): 524-526. doi:10.1038/344524a0.
  8. ^ Feynman, R. P. (1993). "Infinitesimal machinery". Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems 2 (1): 4-14. doi:10.1109/84.232589.
  9. ^ "JeoPOREdy! Where Pores Meet Their Match". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2026.
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