Historically it happened that on the dimensional scale almost all dimensional areas of research were “overlapped” except for the area of nanoscale. However, the world is not without shrewd people. At the beginning of the XX century W. Ostwald published the book “The World of Neglected Magnitudes”, which talked about a new field of chemistry at the time – colloid chemistry, which dealt specifically with particles of nanometer size (although this term was not used at that time). Already in this book he noted that the fragmentation of matter at some point leads to new properties, that the properties of the whole material depend on the size of the particle.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, they were not yet able to “see” particles of this size, because they were below the resolution limits of the light microscope. Therefore, it is not by chance that one of the initial milestones in the appearance of nanotechnology is considered to be the invention by M. Knoll and E. Ruska in 1931 of the electron microscope. Only after that could mankind “see” submicron and nanometer sized objects. And then everything falls into place – the main criterion by which mankind accepts (or does not accept) any new facts and phenomena is expressed in the words of Thomas the Unbeliever: “Until I see, I will not believe.”
The next step was made in 1981 – G. Binnig and H. Rohrer have created a scanning tunneling microscope, which made it possible not only to obtain images of individual atoms, but also to manipulate them. In other words, the technology of which Feynman spoke in his lecture was created. That is when the era of nanotechnology began.
Note that here again we are dealing with the same story. Again, because it is typical for mankind in general not to pay attention to what is at least a little bit ahead of its time. And in the example of nanotechnology it turns out that nothing new was discovered, they just began to understand better what is happening around, what even in ancient times people were already doing, even if unconsciously, or rather, consciously (they knew what they wanted to get), but without understanding the physics and chemistry of the phenomenon. Another matter is that the presence of technology does not mean understanding the essence of the process. Steel was welded long ago, but the understanding of the physical and chemical foundations of steelmaking came much later. We can recall that the secret of Damascus steel has not yet been discovered. Here we have another hypostasis: we know what we need to make, but we do not know how. So the relationship between science and technology is not always simple.
Who was the first to deal with nanomaterials in their modern sense? In 1981, the American scientist G. Gleiter was the first to use the definition “nanocrystalline”. He formulated the concept of creation of nanomaterials and developed it in a series of works in 1981-1986, introduced the terms “nanocrystalline”, “nanostructured”, “nanophase” and “nanocomposite” materials. The main emphasis of these works was on the crucial role of multiple interfaces in nanomaterials as a basis for changing the properties of solids.
One of the most important events in the history of nanotechnology and the development of the ideology of nanoparticles was also the discovery of carbon nanostructures – fullerenes and carbon nanotubes in the mid 80’s – early 90’s of the 20th century, as well as the discovery already in the 21st century of the method of graphene production.
