NANOTECHNOLOGY—TECHNOLOGY ON A MOLECULAR SCALE - Chemistry: Notable Research and Discoveries - page 65

experiments sparked interest in small particles and
their properties.

19 British physicist Sir Joseph John Thomson (1856-

1940) discovers the electron.

190s German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-76),

Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962), Austrian
physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), build-
ing on the work of German physicists Max Planck
(1858-1947) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), dis-
cover the principles of quantum mechanics.

190s German engineers Enrst Ruska (1906-88) and

Max Knoll (1897-1969) develop the first electron
microscope.

19 Texas Instruments researcher Jack Kilby (1923-

2005) invents a tiny electronic circuit known as an
integrated circuit, which rapidly becomes an im-
portant component of computers and other elec-
tronic devices.

199 American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88)

delivers a lecture, “There Is Plenty of Room at the
Bottom,” advocating nanoscale science.

19 Japanese physicist Norio Taniguchi coins the term

nanotechnology.

190s American Louis Brus, a researcher at Bell Labora-

tories, and Russian scientists Alexander Efros and
Aleksey Ekimov discover and investigate quantum
dots.

191 IBM researchers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer

develop the first scanning tunneling microscope.

19 Eric Drexler writes a topic, Engines of Creation,

which draws much attention to nanotechnology.