In his well-renowned 1959 lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” Physicist Richard Feynman challenged his colleagues in the scientific community to think more practically and abandon looking for answers on the large scale—i.e. the composition of the universe, gravitational effects on planets—and instead look at matter on a smaller scale, the atomic scale. The lecture is credited with inspiring the concept of nanotechnology.
In order to emphasize some of the points he made in his talk, Feynman offered prizes to the individuals who could solve two problems: construction of a nanomotor and producing letters small enough that the entire Encyclopedia Britannica could be written on the head of a pin.