There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics" was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more robust form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. Although versions of the talk were reprinted in a few popular magazines, it went largely unnoticed until the 1980s.
Miniaturization (publ. 1961) included Feynman's lecture as its final chapter
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirÅ Tomonaga.
Feynman c. 1965
Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge
At the 1946 colloquium on the "Super" at the Los Alamos Laboratory. Feynman is in the second row, fourth from left, next to Oppenheimer.
Feynman (center) with Robert Oppenheimer (immediately right of Feynman) at a Los Alamos Laboratory social function during the Manhattan Project.