While the concept of manipulating matter at the atomic level can be traced back to Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," the term "nanotechnology" was first coined by Norio Taniguchi in 1974. The field gained significant traction in the 1980s with the advent of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and atomic force microscope (AFM), which allowed scientists to visualize and manipulate individual atoms.
