Welcome the NanoMasses and a Bit o' History

Today, it is hard to imagine two or three million Americans interested in nanotechnology. In Michael Faraday's time in the mid-19th Century, it would have been equally difficult to imagine a world full of electricity, but it was to be only a few decades later.

I was at my brother-in-law's friend's apartment in 1982 and witnessed the "internet" and "email" as they were then, and had a friend who was an early adapter in 1993. He was using Veronica and Mosaic in a flat world, not Google. Seven years later the world had been revolutionized.

About 30 years after Einstein announced that mass and energy were interchangeable (1905), Lisa Meitner and Otto Hahn proved it; a few years after that, the whole world knew its devastating effect.

More recently, transistors, which were invented/discovered in 1947 and integrated circuits in 1958 didn't popularize (made up word, I think . . ) into transistor radios, hand-calculators and personal computers until 1962, 1973 and 1981 (well, for me, anyway).

Since Feynman's talk, through the seminal work on what we now refer to as nanotechnology from the 1970's through the mid-1990s, until today, the nanotech-literate population is TINY. It's going to change dramatically, revolutionarily over the next 5 years.

In 2005, a few hundred or a few thousand may read these words. It won't surprise me if more than a million will have read them by 2010. (and, of course, they should have all read Nanotech Fortunes by then)