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Xenon Letters on Cold Nickel
Owen wanted his niece to see the gap between moving an atom and building an object. She had heard the phrase molecular manufacturing and pictured a small factory setting each molecule where a plan told it to go. Eric Drexler had put that picture in front of the public in the 1980s. Owen had one photograph that looked, at first, like proof.
In 1990, at IBM, two researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to slide xenon atoms across a nickel surface. The surface was under vacuum, and cold enough that an atom stayed where the tip left it. When they finished, the atoms spelled IBM. The work is one tip, then the next atom, and it is slow. A line that produced even a simple device would need a huge number of those steps, running together, in conditions a workshop can keep.