Bucky balls, fullerenes, and the future:

An Oral History Interview with Professor Richard E. Smalley

January 22, 2000

Nanotechnology is the art and science of building materials and devices at the ultimate level of finesse: atom by atom. Like a tiny poem with every word and space wisely placed, a thing built by nanotechnology has every atom in its place, and never two where one will do. . . .Today we begin a collaboration with NASA to develop a new kind of nanotechnology, one that starts with a perfect carbon structure that biology cannot make: fullerene nano-tubes and fibers. The promise of this new technology is vast: cables 100 times stronger than steel at only one-sixth the weight and with the electrical conductivity of copper, nano-computers of vastly greater speed and power in
dramatically smaller packages than possible with the current silicon-based micro-technology, new batteries, fuel cells, solar energy devices, composites, sensors, nano-machines.