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In 1989, at IBM Almaden, Don Eigler used this STM tip to spell out “IBM” in a dot matrix of xenon atoms, one of his favorite elements (he names his dogs after the noble gases).

I saw this tribute to his work inside IBM Almaden, near an early disc drive prototype from the 50’s (even cruder than this 1956 version).

It reminded me of my last visit to Don’s lab, where he let me play with the STM. At that time, he was building logic gates from carbon monoxide that tumble like a cascade of dominoes, and implement functions in a space 260,000 times smaller than the smallest IC equivalent. He ran into a few questions when he filed an IBM expense report for toy dominoes as a prototyping tool…

7 responses to “Don Eigler’s STM”

  1. Vanita Avatar
    Vanita

    Don Eigler … Where do these curious creatures come from?! He sounds an awful lot like Richard Feynman.

    Reply
  2. JeffSech Avatar
    JeffSech

    1989 doesn’t seem like that long ago. Next stop: carbon nanotube belt for the space elevator!

    I love the fact he named his dogs after the noble gases.

    Reply
  3. Todd Huffman Avatar
    Todd Huffman

    It’s amazing how small the STM is… though I guess, um, yeah.

    Reply
  4. msamaclean © Avatar
    msamaclean ©

    Nano technology is soooooooooooooo fascinating! I don’t think the general public has a clue as to the capabilities we have and will have.

    Reply
  5. BenODen Avatar
    BenODen

    Wild how small it is yep! How much more "support electronics" is needed? Just by instinct the picture feels like this shot only shows the vital bits of the device that are supported by lots of other electronics to fulfill its potential. Much like the CPU of a computer could kinda compute on its own, but needs things like memory, power supply, permanent storage and display to fully realize it’s functionning.

    Reply
  6. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Ben: Absolutey. There was a whole room full of equipment attached. It was very "mad scientist" looking with pipes and wires everywhere. They had to create an insanely large magnetic field (I forget how many Teslas)… but all of that could be hidden from the user, and Don created a web interface so that kids in remote schools could move atoms and get acoustic feedback in real-time and visual scans after dragging an atom to a new postion.

    Jeff: Yeah, and he trains them to be seeing eye dogs, so he has them with him at work and every time I have met him.

    Vanita: Yes… the fantastic physicist Feynman (the first person to propose nanotechnology in his 1960 lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”) is especially child-like: "When Richard Feynman faced a problem he was unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thinks and saying, ‘Now, what have we got here?’" – The Science of Creativity, p.102.

    And in this interview I had with Don Eigler, he offered:
    "Younger generations have carried less of the baggage of older generations, and so they’ll see things new and fresh. That’s where real innovation comes from."

    Some more images from IBM
    http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/lobby.html

    Reply
  7. roterhundie Avatar
    roterhundie

    Argon and Neon (Don’s dogs) are service dogs, not seeing eye dogs 🙂

    Reply

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