Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for tiny machines

Person: Richard Feynman
Lived: 1918–1988
Field: Physics
From: American

The story

On 29 December 1959 Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, gave a lecture to the annual meeting of the American Physical Society with the title There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. He argued that the laws of physics did not stop us from writing, storing and building things on the scale of atoms, and he imagined tiny machines, far denser computer circuits and microscopes much more powerful than the electron microscopes of his day.

At the end of the talk he did something unusual for a theoretical physicist. Partly to bring publicity to progress in physics and engineering, he set two challenges and offered a $1,000 prize to the first person to meet each one. The first was to build a working electric motor that would fit inside a cube just one sixty-fourth of an inch, about 0.4 millimetres, on each side, not counting its wires. The second was to shrink writing so much that a page of a book could be written on a surface 25,000 times smaller in linear scale, small enough for the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica to fit on the head of a pin.

The first prize went faster than Feynman expected. By November 1960 William McLellan, a Caltech graduate and meticulous craftsman, had built a motor that met the conditions using conventional tools. Newspapers reported the win, though the motor itself did not advance the field.

The second challenge took a quarter of a century. In 1985 Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford University, working in the laboratory of his adviser, R. Fabian Pease, reduced the first paragraph of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities by a factor of 25,000. The idea came from a fellow student, Ken Polasko, who had recently read Feynman's talk. Newman said text was ideal for showing off the technology because it contains so many different shapes. He collected the second Feynman prize.

The two awards became part of the history of nanotechnology. Since 1993 the Foresight Institute has given annual Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology for experimental and theoretical work, and it offers a $250,000 Feynman Grand Prize for building a nanoscale robotic arm and an 8-bit adder. Feynman's small, personal bets showed how a clear goal and a modest reward can focus inventors on a problem.