Richard BF

I was amazed back in the 1980s, as IBM and other companies were inventing Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM), the manipulation and display of individual atoms. I remember when IBM researchers were able to write the word IBM, atom by atom. But I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope until this recent post on Gizmodo. It looks like an old Capsella kit, which surprisingly, you can still buy.

Anyway, if you’ve never seen any STM images, you should start at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. And to think that atoms were once the smallest elements in the universe, and actually seeing them was only something we dreamed about.